“It was your meat loaf!” Jared screamed. “How many goddamned times do I have to tell you, I don’t like green peppers in the meat. I can’t digest them. But every time we have meat loaf, there they are! Then I spend the whole night on the toilet.”
“Jared, you know the doctors treat any symptoms as a possible rejection until proven otherwise,” said Janice. “I’m supposed to worry.”
There was still that calm in her voice from the meeting, but it sounded on the verge of disintegrating any minute.
“I knew those peppers had a return ticket, man,” he said. “They were just vacationing in my stomach.”
I finally settled my gaze on the scenery passing by the window. I tried to keep quiet and avoid looking guilty. The neighborhoods of North Branch had always interested me. I was beginning to find some calm when I felt Meredith’s hot breath on my ear.
“Don’t turn around,” she whispered.
Her short exhalation echoed around in the acoustic meatus of my ear. A shiver started in my neck and coursed through my body. I did as she said.
“Jared, it’s been a long time since your last rejection occurrence,” said Janice up front. “Don’t you see where I’m coming from here?”
Jared belched in reply.
“I know what you did,” Meredith breathed. “I know you saw me. But I saw what you did. And I’ll tell if you tell. Is that clear, you perv?”
I nodded slowly. Upon uttering her last word, her lips had almost grazed my ear. I was paralyzed by the warmth of the almost-contact.
“Why does this always happen?” asked Janice to herself.
“Because I’m damaged goods,” said Jared.
“Don’t say that,” she said. “Don’t you ever say that about yourself.”
Promptly, Janice turned her eyes to me in the rearview mirror. She looked like she might break down at any moment. “I’m sorry you had to experience this, Sebastian,” she said. “I was so hoping you’d enjoy yourself and want to come back. Nothing ever turns out right around here.”
Her gaze returned to the road. The passing headlights flashed over her eyes.
“Does Mr. Whitcomb go to church?” I asked.
I’m not sure what impelled me to ask the question. Most likely, I just felt I should say something to cover the silence. But there was a long pause after I spoke. I looked at Jared. His lips were pursed and he violently shook his head.
“Mr. Whitcomb does things his own way,” Janice said. And that was all.
The rest of the van ride was a continuation of this uncomfortable quiet. Jared refused to look at me. Meredith stayed far away from my tingling ear. I waited patiently for it to end, adding up what I now knew about Jared and Meredith’s father. (1) He worked in sales. (2) He did things his own way. (3) I had never seen him.
Later, when I was biking back to the church to recover the bass guitar, my thoughts returned to the neighborhoods of North Branch and their sense of proximity that I found so perplexing. Even though there was ample space for building in the hilly landscape of eastern Iowa, residents chose to construct and live in neat rows of houses, connected by sidewalks like links in a chain.
Yet Bucky had envisioned a world where people could be more autonomous than this. A world where they would elect to live in remote areas and take care of all their own needs. But here was a spacious rural area, and the citizenry had not chosen isolation and privacy. They had chosen community. Nana had always extolled the virtues of Bucky’s plan, which is why we lived in Iowa away from the town proper in our own “autonomous dwelling unit.” To her, it was a more elevated stage of freedom.
But I had always had a sneaking suspicion that our tours were not just administered for financial and educational purposes. Before she had experienced her brain-blood interruptions, I often saw a real delight in Nana’s eyes when people came to visit our home. She was never more spirited and dynamic than when she was leading a tour of nodding visitors. And there were days when she stayed around talking to a curious architect, or a child with a school report, for hours. This was not the behavior of someone with no use for community. Her acts were not those of a loner.
I hiked up the hill toward the dome, looking up at the basswoods that marked the exit from the heart of the woods. They were completely bare now and they contrasted greatly against a sky that looked white with clouds even in the dark. It was probably going to snow. If there was one thing I understood, it was the portent of night weather.
Everything was murky inside the dome, but not quite dark. It was only eight-thirty, yet it seemed Nana was already in bed. I checked on her after setting the paint on the kitchen table. For once, she was just where I expected her to be, curled up in her bedroom, one leg dangling off the bed. I delicately picked up her leg and arranged it next to the other one. It was so lightweight. It had never occurred to me until the stroke just how slight of build Nana was. I was watching her thin chest move up and down, trying to see if her breathing was regular, when she opened her lips and mumbled something like:
“Churrrp.”
I leaned closer. “Nana,” I said. “Are you awake?”
“Sebasyan,” she said, plain as day. I took a step back. “Don’t go in the church.”
My heart seized.
“What?” I said.
Nana’s eyes flipped open. But she did not look at me. Her eyes were white, the eyeballs rolled up in her head. “No one is your family,” she said. “No one is your family but me.”
Her words were slow and punctuated with long sighs. She was still asleep.
“Nana,” I whispered. “I’m trying my best.”
She did not say anything for a long time. And I thought she had fallen back into a deep sleep. But then she rolled over, and her leg dropped off the side of the bed again.
“This cannot last,” she said.
I lingered in her bedroom after her last words, waiting for something else. Something that might allow me to fully understand what had just happened. Nothing came. Even her breathing quieted. I sat down on the floor and closed my eyes. I searched my memory for what I’d learned about this kind of thing. Bucky had explained it in terms of waves. Much like the way radio and satellites used invisible wave patterns, he thought the human mind was also capable of emitting and receiving these “ultrahigh frequency” waves. This phenomenon was typically referred to as telepathy. Nana had always claimed this was possible, but I had never been given cause to believe her until now.
Yet it appeared that I was emitting signals. Waves were streaming from my guilty conscience and crashing on the shores of Nana’s perception. What’s more, Nana was actively seeking them. She was waiting for them when I wasn’t there. I sat cross-legged facing her bed, trying to shut off my brain, trying to erase every thought before it became swollen and frothy. It was impossible. I had always had a lively internal life, perhaps because of my solitude. All I had to do was shut my eyes and there were images and events, like a reel of film. I had no idea how much she knew, but it was clear she knew something. Wholly overcome, I walked back out into the night, and out to the shed. I uncovered the bass guitar.
It was still speckled with dust, even after miles of rubbing against my back. I found a stiff rag and some mineral oil, and I rubbed it down until it gleamed in the light of the white sky. I ran my fingertips over the body. The varnish was black at the edges and got gradually lighter on the way to the strings. The center was the color of parched summer grass. Under the strings was a caramel-colored stretch of tortoiseshell to protect the wood. The knobs were silver. The strings were corrugated, and I could feel the tiny grooves against my fingers.
I knew it had to be plugged in in order to really work, but I strapped it on anyway and stepped out into the woods. I didn’t know where to put my fingers, so I just pressed down one string with my pointer finger. I plunked the string, and a quiet buzz filled the air around me. It wasn’t the same feeling I’d had pl
aying Jared’s guitar. But I still felt the subtle vibrations from the string working their way up my forearm. I prowled around the dark woods in the cold, banging on the top string with my right thumb and moving the fingers of my left hand incrementally up and down the neck. Jared called each of these stations “frets.” I let my fingertips linger at each one, and tried to take note of the sound. I looked up at the sky while I played, and eventually, true to my prediction, a light snow started to fall. Thud. Thud. Thud-thud-thud. I pulled harder on the top string and roamed deeper into the woods.
Picking up speed, I began jogging through the forest, slapping wildly at the bass. The snowflakes were few, but they were thick, and I could feel them on my face and neck. They bit my cheeks when the wind picked up. I zigzagged through the trees. Brittle oak leaves crunched under my shoes. Night animals heard me coming and scooted from their perches and hovels. Bam. Bam. Thud-thud-thud. My fingers continued attacking the strings. I stopped and leaned against a walnut tree. Bam. Thud-thud. Bam. I closed my eyes and let the snowflakes gather on my eyelashes. This bass guitar belonged to a God. Maybe, I thought, if I asked for his forgiveness, he would teach me how to play it.
I couldn’t do it right away, though. First, I had to let him see that I intended to use it for good. To make my friend happy again. I tried to ignore all the potential repercussions of my theft, both earthly and for my exiled soul. It was possible in the snow, with my breath escaping in white blasts, to just appreciate the moment. A taste of that first exhilaration in Jared’s room had returned. And I knew what I had to do to end the night.
I stowed away the stolen bass and crept back inside. I located the slip of paper Janice had given me the evening after Nana’s stroke, and there was Jared’s e-mail address. Underneath it was the wrong phone number. Meredith’s private number. I picked up the cordless receiver. It was cool against my ear. I dialed the number and listened to it ring in short pulses on the other end. Then her voice came on the line.
“What?” she said.
“Meredith?”
I spoke almost in a whisper.
“Uh-huh,” she said. “Who is this?”
I had intended to apologize for watching her at the church. I had intended to tell her that I would never inform another living being about what I had seen. I had maybe even intended on asking her what I could do to stop being a weirdo. What I actually said into the phone, in a coarse kind of whisper, was:
“You don’t know me.”
There was a slight pause on the other end.
“I don’t, huh?” she said. “Then who gave you my number, Mr. Mysterious?”
“Is that of consequence?” I said.
“What?”
I quickly cleared my throat. “Does that matter?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It depends on a few things, I guess.”
I could hear an impish grin in her voice. And I realized that the way she spoke on the phone was much different from the way she spoke any other time.
“What does it depend on?” I asked.
“Why you’re calling me, and what you look like.”
“I’m pretty tall,” I said.
“Okay.”
“And I’m calling to . . . listen to your voice.”
“Yeah?” she said. “Tell me more.”
“I like you,” I said.
She was quiet.
“I like the way you look. And I like your . . . scowls.”
“My scowls?”
“You’re beguiling,” I said quickly. “Especially when you look mad.”
“I see,” she said. “So are you calling to set up an appointment?” she said.
“An appointment?”
“Jesus,” she said, “I thought you guys talked about everything. You don’t know how this works?”
“No,” I said. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
She sighed. “Tell me what night you want the window open,” she said, plainly.
I couldn’t speak for a moment.
“The window. I don’t . . .”
“Let me make this perfectly clear . . .” she said.
“I think I have to go,” I whispered. “I apologize.”
“No, wait,” she said. “Just tell me which night.”
“I apologize,” I said again.
I thrust the phone onto the charger and listened to it beep. I watched it, rigid with fear. The armpits of my flannel were soaked. From her bedroom, I could hear Nana lightly snoring. Outside the dome, the snow was still coming down in sparse swollen flakes. It looked like pieces of the white sky were flitting toward the ground all around me.
When I was young, Nana had said once that we lived inside a snow globe, only our weather was on the outside. Looking out now, her words came back to me. It was meant to be a comforting portrayal of our home, but on this night, as I felt my body relaxing and dream logic beginning to take over, all I could think about was a giant hand picking up the dome and giving it a healthy shake. In my mind, I watched all our furniture toppling over, the plates crashing, the NordicTrack spinning like an asteroid, Nana and I tumbling like two small animals caught in a dryer.
13.
A Model World
THE FIRST GEOSCOPE WAS CONSTRUCTED IN 1951 AT Cornell University. It was completed under the supervision of distinguished guest lecturer R. Buckminster Fuller, and it was built by his students of architecture and engineering. The main idea was to create a “lifeboat” version of the larger Spaceship Earth. This lifeboat would enable a viewer to step inside and see things that they could never see from looking up at the sky from the real Earth. The Geoscope was, in essence, both a flawless model and a portal. And once you climbed inside, you would (Fuller hoped) be completely overwhelmed by a sense of world harmony.
I woke early the next morning from a nervous stomachache, and I used the hours before Nana rose to brush up on my knowledge of our project. I sat in my clothes from the night before, looking through a stack of architecture books. It was surprising to find that a Geoscope relied on a very simple design strategy. With the aid of a special kind of map, divided into triangles, one could simply transfer what was on the map to the corresponding triangle on the dome. The work, it seemed, was going to be more acrobatic than mentally taxing. I could already tell it was going to involve long-term dome-scaling on my part.
Nana began to stir around nine, and before I saw her, I heard her listening to her whale calls and humming to herself. Then I heard the susurration of the misting Fog shower in her bathroom. It used only a pint of water to send a fine high-powered mist across the entire body at once (I usually took baths). Finally, she walked into the dome with a yellow bandanna on her head, and a pair of overalls that must have been forty years old. She spotted me near the telephone in the kitchen area, not far from where I had slept. She looked at the cans of Derbyshire paint, and then she looked back at me.
“Good morning, Sebastian,” she said.
“Hello, Nana,” I said, looking at a book.
She opened the fridge and nosed around, pulling out half-empty jugs of juice and tubs of yogurt. After removing a few items and placing them on the counter, she stopped and walked over to my spot on the floor. She peered down at me.
“You’ll forgive me for . . . drifting off so early last night,” she said. “I wanted to recharge before our work commenced this morning.”
“I understand,” I said.
She kept staring at me. She reached down and pulled something from my hair. It was a small twig from the woods. She held it up to the light.
“I experienced the most peculiar and disturbing dreams last night,” she said.
I swallowed hard. “What did you dream about?”
“I’ve lost it,” she said. “For now, at least . . .”
Her face froze. “I can’t recall.”
She adjusted her bandanna, tucking s
ome white locks underneath. Her eyes flashed. “It will come back. These visions, they always come back. They return when they want. I wish I could say I conquered the metaphysical in my life, Sebastian. But perceptions, you see, they operate on their own schedule.”
She looked at me one last time, then moved back to the kitchen table. She slowly read the words on the side of the paint can, then she cracked open the lid with the small metal key that had been provided.
“I saw you,” she said.
I held my breath a moment. “You saw me?”
“Just for a moment.”
“In your dream?”
I waited, watching her eyes.
“No. I saw you outside last night. You were in the woods with a large branch in your hands. I woke for a moment and only saw you, your . . . silhouette. It was dark.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Where were you going?”
“Just walking,” I said. “The winter air was so fresh.”
She was still looking into the paint can.
“You relish moments without your Nana,” she said.
“That’s not it.”
“You have made your feelings clear about this project,” she said.
She stuck a wooden stirrer into the thick paint and began to swirl it around.
“This is what he was planning when we first met. Did you know that?” she asked.
“You and Bucky?”
She tapped the stirrer on the can and laid it down.
“He was building a fifty-foot-diameter Geoscope in Edwardsville the year I was there,” she said. “It served as the university’s auditorium. But he wanted to build a bigger one within eyeshot of the United Nations in New York. Blackwell’s Island it was called at the time. I was going to go with him.”
“But you’ve never lived in New York,” I said.
Nana ignored my comment. She seemed to be speaking straight from memory. Like the exact words had been memorized along with the images. “It was going to be so big that all the delegates would have to do was look out the window, and there would be our planet, suspended by clear cables. And not only that, but Bucky was going to rig it with thousands of tiny computer-controlled lights. And anywhere in the world where there was armed conflict, the lights would flash red. So all the world’s leaders could see the problems they caused right in front of their eyes. Every day on the job, they’d see their mistakes blinking in red.”
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