“Sebastian, please,” she said.
“It’s my duty to operate the gift stand, Nana. I grasp that. And I know each part of our work is important. But the situation is different right now, isn’t it? I’m sixteen years old. And since you’ve come back from the hospital . . .”
“It won’t,” she interrupted, toneless. “It won’t occur.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to discuss.”
“I want to, Nana. I want to discuss this.”
She was quiet for a moment.
“Because you do not possess the necessary . . . aptitude!” she said.
“What?”
“It pains me to say this. You barely comprehend what I teach. How can you expect to teach . . . others?” Her strangled speech made the words even sharper. They seemed to puncture the air. I felt my stomach clench.
“I see,” is all I could think to say.
She took a long breath. My face was starting to warm.
“Now go and do what I’ve asked you.”
I got up on what felt like someone else’s legs, and walked directly to the telephone stand. I pulled open the drawer and thumbed through the telephone book. In a moment, I had found Small World Paints in downtown North Branch. I turned around, at that point, to watch for Nana, but she was no longer in the living room. The door to her room was closed again, and presumably she was behind it. I exhaled and almost choked on my breath. I was holding it all in. I flipped to the pages of the residential section. I located the W’s. Whisler. Whitaker. Whitby. And finally . . .
WHITCOMB Janice & Ronald 3200 Ovid Ave
I copied the information onto a note card and walked briskly out of the dome into the nip of the afternoon. I marched across our property, moving toward a large storage shed about a hundred yards down the hill. This was the building that had once housed Nana’s three-wheel eco-car. It was a curiously small auto, and we had used it to buy groceries in the winter. But now, in the wake of the car’s irreparable breakdown, the storage shed housed my Schwinn Voyager bicycle. My only gift from Nana on my twelfth birthday. I often wondered if she’d only purchased it for me so I could run her errands. It had come equipped with large handlebar-mounted baskets for groceries, and a seat pocket for money. I brought it down from its hooks and checked the tires. I adjusted my seat and mirrors. Then I grabbed my mustard-colored helmet off its peg, and I opened the doors of the shed. I tried to hold back tears.
I launched myself out of the shed and was off, shooting over the dead leaves and clingy brush of the hill. My tires bounced over the uneven slope and my teeth clicked together. I pedaled harder, cranking the chain over its gear, and eventually I hopped the curb onto the sharp decline of Hillsboro Drive. I gripped the handlebars and pedaled away as fast as I possibly could. The wind burned my eyes, and I let them water. I felt the hot streams glance down my cheeks. I watched the blurry road disappear under my tires.
IT TOOK ME A HALF HOUR TO ARRIVE AT SMALL WORLD Paints. The store was packed with merchandise, but I was able to locate the fast-drying spray paint in white. I calmly selected two canisters and walked under the humming fluorescent lights of the store to the shiny counter. A squat balding man was awaiting me. I handed him the paint. He rolled it around in his palm. He looked at my face, raw from crying.
“You aren’t planning on getting up to any kind of vandalism with this Krylon paint, are you?” he asked me.
“No,” I said, “I just have to alter some road signs for my grandmother.”
He looked me over again before hesitantly ringing me up for the paint. He handed me my change, slowly. Then he watched me as I stepped outside and loaded the canisters into my handlebar-mounted basket. I looked around the small square of downtown North Branch. I’d been told it was supposed to be modeled after Dutch architecture. The buildings were brick, tall and narrow, with decorative awnings. It was a bit disorienting. Even the streets were cobbled instead of paved. I looked up and down the road, and eventually my eyes landed on the corner shop across the way and came to an abrupt halt.
“The Record Collector,” read a large sign.
From across the street, I could see the front glass covered in bright wall-sized posters of large men with gold teeth, and women clad in small neon shorts. The performers had one-word names and serious faces. A T-shirt hanging up nearby showed a man in a goat mask brandishing a chain saw. I guided my bike up to the front and put my hand against glass. It throbbed under my palm. I opened the door.
I stood for a moment in the entryway, holding my breath, taking in the environs. It was ill-lit inside, and it smelled like the stinky incense Nana burned sometimes on the eve of Bucky’s death. In front of me were waist-high shelves of compact discs, organized alphabetically. An obese man with a tight stocking cap sat behind a counter, looking at a magazine. He had large black glasses similar to Jared’s. On the stereo, a man said: I seen her on the street, a definite cutie
But my eyes were locked on that pirate’s booty!
I looked up to find the origin of the sound and instead met the stocking-cap man’s spectacled eyes. They were pink and narrow.
“You need something!” he screamed over the song.
He picked up a soggy sandwich of some kind and took an impressive bite.
“I’m on break technically,” he chewed, “but I’m here to help you. Right on.”
“What?” I asked.
“Right on!” he said.
I walked away from him and into the belly of the store, the music playing from tiny speakers all around me. I scanned the categories above the racks. Pop. R&B. Country. Classic. I was the sole patron in the place. It felt as if the store existed only for me. I picked up a few discs and examined them. They were glossy, covered in strange photographs. The beat still thundered through the store. I walked back up to the counter.
“Do you have any discs by the Misfits?” I asked.
The man chewed and swallowed. “Metal,” he said.
“What?”
“They’re in Metal!”
I looked up at him. He sighed and slapped his magazine down on the counter.
“It helps if you can read,” he said, more to himself.
He grumbled as I followed him to the back of the store. He pointed a meaty finger at the words “Heavy Metal.” Then he pointed at the discs housed under that label.
“I thought the Misfits played punk rock music,” I said.
“Listen, man,” he said, “I don’t make up the retarded rules around here. I’m just a wage slave. If you want to take this to the Supreme Court, that’s your decision.”
He waddled away, and I went to the M section. I looked through the discs until I saw a picture of a yellow and black skull staring at me. I picked it up. On the opposite side, the song titles were listed. I scanned down the list. “Vampira.” “I Turned into a Martian.” “Green Hell.” “Skulls.” The disc cost seventeen dollars and sixty-eight cents with tax. I chewed a fingernail. That was a third of our weekly grocery bill at the cooperative.
I dug into my pocket, where I had placed the change from the paint. I felt around and pulled out some one-dollar bills, some change, and finally a crumpled twenty. I smoothed the bill on the leg of my blue jeans. I was rarely given any money at all. The cash I earned from the gift stand went right back into sustaining the dome. And, according to Nana, the money that my parents had left me only covered the expenses needed to raise me. Nana was usually very careful with her finances. Maybe this time she had just reached for the money without looking. Maybe she had meant to give it to me. Or maybe it was a test. I looked at the skull. I slowly walked the disc up to the counter.
“I’ve made a selection,” I said.
“Amazing,” he said. “Way to go.”
He surveyed my choice. “Oh,” he said, “you have to be eighteen to buy this one.”
He handed the
disc back to me.
“Eighteen years old?”
“Yeah,” he said. “They measure age in years now, man.”
I turned it over in my hands. There was a sticker on the front that warned about explicit content. The man ignored me now, pretending I wasn’t there.
“It’s my first one,” I said.
The man broke his trance. “Your first what?”
“My first compact disc.”
“You’ve never bought an album before?” he asked.
I shook my head. He looked like he was going to choke on his sandwich. And for a minute, he seemed unsure what to do. He looked around the store, his eyes shifting back and forth. Then he looked behind him at a door to the back room.
“Jesus,” he said.
I watched him intently.
“Here!” He spastically waved his hand. “Gimme that damn thing back.”
I handed the disc back to him and he punched a series of buttons on the register. I placed my bill on the counter and watched it disappear into the cash drawer. Twenty dollars. The man shook his head, uttering more profanity to himself. He ripped the explicit-content sticker off the cover and made my change as fast as he could.
“Now get out of here,” he said. “You’ve seriously compromised my job, man.”
I obliged him, walking a straight path out the door. The fact that I possessed no form of disc player did not even occur to me at that moment. I had just known, somehow, that I was supposed to purchase the album. It had been there to be found by me. I held tight to the brown wrapping all the way to my bike.
The disc fit safely beside the paint cans in my basket. I stood looking at it a moment. A small square inside a paper bag. I understood then why I wasn’t concerned about my lack of a stereo. The answer just clicked into my head. I wasn’t buying this album for myself. I never had been. I zipped up my basket cover and angled my bike away from the expressway. I dug my feet into the Dutch cobblestones of historic downtown North Branch, and fastened my helmet. I rode off in search of Whitcombs.
7.
Tensional Forces
SOMETHING THAT IS EASY TO FORGET ABOUT THE universe when you live in isolation is just how full of motion it is. It’s in a state of perpetual motion, technically. The whole entire thing: going, going, going. Never stopping. At least that’s the way Fuller described it. He said the universe is always transforming. And since every human body is composed of the same elements that compose the physical universe, then people are actually miniature universes in and of themselves. We, too, are in a state of persistent motion. And if the universe has unlimited possibilities, we, too, have unlimited possibilities.
Nana was right when she said I hadn’t retained everything I’d read under her tutelage, but I had retained that fact. And until that afternoon, I wasn’t sure I had ever believed the part about unlimited human possibility. But now that I was pedaling forward, the scenery rushing past me, it seemed plausible. My feet were flying. My calves were burning. I didn’t know where Jared’s house was, but I was traveling there.
Had I been looking at the town from above, I believe I could have located the place in a matter of seconds. But now that I was on the ground, everything was different. It was all so immediate and near. I had to ride over the avenues in nearly all directions before I happened to arrive randomly at Ovid Avenue. I stopped right below the sign, almost on the verge of giving up. But there it was. A green street sign with the letters perfectly placed. OVID AVENUE. I looked up and down the street. The address of the nearest house was only 440. How many blocks away was 3200? A thousand?
I briefly thought of leaving and coming back another day, but I found I was no longer concerned about painting the highway signs. There was nothing I could do but keep moving forward (like the universe). So I embarked down the street, getting my legs in a rhythm again. I watched as the wall of houses flashed past. White-White. Brick-Brick. White-White. I could see some people through their windows, the same way I was so often visible inside my glass dome. These people were on display, too: eating, viewing TV, conversing. I could see seconds of their lives happening.
I became so absorbed trying to see inside the North Branch houses, I nearly passed the Whitcombs’ home twenty minutes later. I only came to a stop because Ovid Avenue had reached a dead end. And Jared’s house was midway into the final circle of houses. I had to hop off my Voyager and walk closer to check the numbers, but I found it soon enough. 3200. Painted white on the curb. I leaned my bike against a large beech tree in the yard and stood on the sidewalk, staring at the Whitcomb residence.
It was not a dome.
I hadn’t presumed that it would be. Nonetheless, that was my first thought. It was not a dome, and it shared no quality with domes. All geodesic domes, like ours, were based on a concept that Fuller called tensegrity. The word was one of his hybrids, in this case a combination of “tension” and “integrity.” A tensegrity structure was one that had reached a perfect balance. Each part buttressed its neighbor part faultlessly to distribute pressure.
The Whitcombs’ house had little to no tensegrity. If anything, it had tengility. There was nothing wrong with the home. It was a modest two-story structure, tan brick, with a pointed gable roof. The windows were all rectangular except the big one on the second story, which had a curved top. I had seen many houses like it from the dome. But, up close, the structure seemed tenuous to me. There was a barely perceptible sag to the awning of the porch. The roof had recently been reshingled, but the pattern was not even. And the downspout had been partially detached from the side of the house.
I grabbed my brown bag from the front basket and stepped onto the lawn. I looked up and saw a pair of purple athletic sneakers hanging from a branch in the tree. I heard the tinkle of a wind chime, and looked to the porch where a swarm of aluminum angels clanged into one another over the door. Below the chime was a thick welcome mat that said, “God Bless This House.” The curtains were drawn on the bay windows, and the inside looked dark. I took another step toward the house, and when I did, I heard a voice.
“Sebastian?”
It came from behind me, slightly muffled. I whipped around and there was Janice Whitcomb, crossing the street. She was bundled in her beige coat and green-blue scarf. She carried a box of something rustling and rolling around.
“I thought that was you,” she said. “I was just down the street at this ridiculous candle party and I said to myself, ‘There’s a prowler on our lawn.’ ”
“I didn’t mean to prowl, Mrs. Whitcomb,” I said.
“I know that, Sebastian. Don’t look so nervous. I recognized you when I got closer.”
She stopped and looked me over. Her dark hair was in a ponytail that day, and a few long wisps hung over her round cheeks. She looked oddly exhilarated.
“Jared will be pleased,” she said.
“He’s at home?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Where else would he be?”
She walked over the porch and swung open the front door. Right away, a blast of warm air came out, stinging my eyes. Janice propped open the door with the box of candles. There were large thick tubes of wax inside, at least twenty, and it smelled like ginger-bread. “Everyone is home but my husband,” she continued. “He’s always flying somewhere. Sales. I’m glad you took me up on my offer, though. How’s your grandmother?”
“Nana is improved,” I said.
“Good to hear.”
I still stood outside. The door was open, but for some reason I hadn’t yet stepped through. Janice watched me, confused. I clutched my small brown bag tightly.
“You can leave your shoes on, Sebastian,” she said. “This is a shoes-on house. Just give them a wipe!”
I glanced down at the mat again, taking in each word individually. God. Bless. This. House. I wiped my feet, slowly. There were smells drifting from inside, the smells of another family. I inhaled
sharply and stepped across the threshold. Janice kicked the box aside, and the door closed right behind me. Mrs. Whitcomb stood looking at me, and I realized I was still wearing my bicycling helmet.
“Jared’s in his room,” she said. “Upstairs and to the right.”
I took off my helmet and looked around. The living room was to my left. It was an adequate-sized room, but it appeared so much smaller than any space in the dome. The ceiling was low, and there was a lot of furniture. Two immense brown sofas fit together at a right angle across the room, and two leather chairs sat near the front windows. On the wall opposite the windows was a gargantuan television with an elaborate sound system attached. Above the television was a small brass cross with Jesus splayed across it. I had never been to church, but I’d seen the image.
“Go ahead,” said Janice. “Just go up and knock on his door. I’ll make some grilled cheese sandwiches.”
I walked to the end of the hall to a staircase. I was about to go up when I noticed a closed door with an enormous poster of a shirtless man covering it. The man was sitting on the hood of a shiny black car, and his hair was dripping wet. He seemed to be looking right at me. Across his broad hairless chest in thick black marker read the words “MEREDITH’S ROOM.” Then, on his flat, sweaty stomach, it said, “STAY OUT!” I could hear a slight murmur from behind the door, then a laugh. I hurried past.
The stair steps were covered in worn red carpeting. I ascended all the way up to a narrow hall about the same width as the staircase. At the end of the hall, on the right, was a door. The only thing that was on the door was a short command scratched into the wood. “Rise Above!” it said. I stuffed my helmet under my arm and approached the door. I knocked four times. A few long seconds passed, then the knob turned and the door opened a crack. An enlarged eye looked out at me through a fogged lens.
“Hi,” I said.
The door opened slightly wider, and Jared wiped the condensation from his glasses. He removed a mini white headphone from his ear.
The House of Tomorrow Page 6