The House of Tomorrow

by Peter Bognanni

  “You were going to go with him?”

  Nana nodded. “He met with the secretary-general and gave a stunning presentation. We were already making plans. There was an apartment rented. A real brownstone, Bucky said. A rooftop garden, and an old man in the next building who taught pigeons to fly in patterns.”

  “What happened?”

  “No one could raise the money. He wanted ten million dollars to do it his way. He could have done it for much less, but everything had to be perfect. If it wasn’t done to complete perfection, it wasn’t worth doing at all. That’s the way it worked with Bucky. Many great things were left behind.”

  Nana looked at me again. “We’re going to create a . . . stunning Geoscope here. For less than a thousand dollars! And somewhere, somewhere, wherever he is, Bucky is going to look down and see it!” She paused and took a breath. “He’s going to see it and he’s going to see his mistake. But I need your help, Sebastian. I can’t do it without your healthy frame, and your . . . acquired skills.”

  She walked into her bedroom and returned a moment later with a large map she had been working on. It was a combination of all her sketches, divided up into triangles and ready for transfer. She held it up before me, but she wouldn’t look me in the eye.

  “Now, are you going to assist me . . . or not?”

  She spread the map out on the table and smoothed it.

  “We’ll finish it together,” I said.

  A shaky hand moved off the map and pointed to the South Pole.

  “Good,” she said. “Let’s begin here.”

  WE WORKED ALL OF THE MORNING, AND MOST OF THE afternoon, wiping down the glass triangles with warm solvent-soaked rags then transferring the detail of the coastlines into the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. We followed the intricate lines of the ice shelves, and dipped into the cavities of the Ross and Wed-dell seas. After two coats, the Derbyshire sparkled with an emerald sheen. We worked in complete silence, huddling over the map and transplanting the twists and turns of the land as best we could.

  It was odd to obscure the surface of something that had been clear for so long, but Nana didn’t give me much time to brood. She worked inhumanly fast, and I tried my best to keep pace. For the most part, I was able to keep my mind on my work. But I also found myself looking over my shoulder after every few brushstrokes, focusing on the roof of the storage shed where I kept my contraband bass guitar. I wanted to hold it again. I wanted to figure out how to operate it and make it rumble out those low melodies that I had listened to on the cheap scratchy computer speakers. What had Jared said about that Ramones song? The bass part was so easy anyone could play it. How did it go again? Duh-nuh-nuh-nuh-Nuh Duh. Duh-nuh-nuh-nuh-Nuh Duh. Beat on the brat. Beat on the brat. Beat on the brat with a baseball bat, oh, yeah! OH, YEAH!

  “Sebastian, what are you doing?”

  Startled, I looked at Nana.

  “What are you making those horrible sounds for?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Someone is here. A woman. Tell her to leave.”

  I turned around in an instant, and there was Janice Whitcomb standing in front of her van in the driveway. I dropped my paintbrush to the ground. Janice waved.

  “Nana,” I said. “You know who that is . . .”

  Nana glanced at me with such hostile confusion that I knew immediately she didn’t remember. She didn’t remember any of the day of her stroke.

  “Never mind,” I said. “I’ll inform her.”

  “Explain about the project,” Nana shouted. “Tell her to come back and visit when the institute opens!”

  Without wasting a second, she set to work on the shoreline of the Amundsen Sea. I trekked rapidly across the snow-spotted yard, past the closed-down gift stand, and directly up to the teal minivan where Janice was standing.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Whitcomb,” I said. “Is there a problem?”

  I tried not to look toward the shed again, where the stolen bass was sitting, waiting to be discovered. Janice watched Nana for a moment.

  “She didn’t wave to me,” said Janice. “I waved to her twice.”

  “She gets very wrapped up in her projects,” I said. “It’s really something. Try not to take it as an affront.”

  Janice frowned. Then she looked toward the long tinted window of the van.

  “He wants to apologize,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Jared,” she said. “He insisted I drive him over here to apologize to you for ruining your experience at Youth Group. He feels so bad about it. I’ve never seen him like this. It’s really quite strange, to be honest with you.”

  I stared at the dark window. I couldn’t see anything inside.

  “Is he going to come out?” I asked.

  “It’s too cold for him, Sebastian,” she said. “He’d like you to step inside.”

  I snuck a glance back at Nana. She was absorbed in her painting. Janice slid open the door for me. Jared was inside, bundled in two hooded sweatshirts under his leather jacket. He wore a stocking cap with a patch on it that read “Discharge.” He was watching out the opposite window. Janice closed the door behind me.

  “You don’t check your e-mail now?” he said.

  Inside, the van was warm and sticky like his room.

  “I check it when I’m able,” I said.

  He turned and faced me. There was a light bruise under his left eye.

  “What happened to your face?” I asked.

  “Fight with Meredith,” he said. “Forget it. We have more important things to chat about.”

  “Does anybody know about the bass guitar?”

  “No,” he said. “But we need to practice soon. So we need to move quickly.”

  Jared shivered and pulled one of his hoods up over his stocking cap. The top of the hood rested on his glasses. He licked his dry lips.

  “Janice is watching my every move after my little puke-tastic diversion. The house is in total fucking lockdown. I had to pretend to cry just to get over here. It was humiliating.”

  “Nana might be onto me, too. I think she had a psychic episode.”

  Jared just nodded at this information. It didn’t seem to register.

  “I had to tell her you were my best friend,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Are you even listening to me?” he yelled. “Janice! I told Janice you were my best fucking pal and that I had to talk to you.”

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up, though,” he added quickly. “I don’t really know anyone else right now. You can’t be my best friend unless I have more than one friend and then I choose you to be the best. That’s how it works.”

  He looked out the window and fogged the glass with a sigh.

  “But you are a friend, I guess,” he said.

  “I know,” I said.

  “You don’t know anything,” he said.

  A digital watch beeped on his wrist, and he pulled out a container of pills from inside his jacket. He unscrewed the cap. I stared at the bottle.

  “I want you to teach me how to play the bass,” I said.

  “I’ll try,” he said. “I’m not a damn miracle worker, though. If you suck ass, you suck ass. End of story.”

  “I won’t suck an ass,” I said.

  Jared looked at me, surprised. Then he started laughing. He dry-swallowed a pill.

  “It’s just suck ass,” he said, “but that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you swear.”

  “Bucky believed that curse words were sullying the English language,” I said.

  Jared downed another pill. Then he reached down and pulled out a piece of paper. He handed it to me. It was a sheet of bass guitar notes and chords, printed off the Web. There were no musical notes. The paper just showed each string of the bass, and where to put your fingers to make different notes.


  “This is a tablature,” he said. “It’s the fastest way to learn. Practice these notes, and we’ll set up a time this week. Learn them, okay? Practice every night when the old crone goes to bed.”

  “Nana is not . . .”

  “Just practice!” he said.

  I folded the paper up and stuck it in my pocket.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Go fuck yourself,” he said.

  He smiled. “Say it back,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “If we’re going to be in a band, you need to start learning these things.”

  “But, I just told you—”

  “Say it!”

  We stared at each other.

  “Go . . . fuck yourself,” I said, quietly.

  “Good,” he said. “Now don’t ever say that to me again. Get out of my van!”

  When I slid open the door, he yelled out to Janice. “Problem solved. Let’s go! Now!”

  I got out and slammed the door closed. Janice was waiting patiently, watching Nana paint. She grabbed a hold of my hand when I walked by and pressed it.

  “Your grandmother doesn’t know about us, does she?” she said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  Janice just looked at me.

  “No,” I said. “She doesn’t like me going into North Branch very often. And I don’t think she recalls the day of her accident.”

  “I don’t like lying,” said Janice.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She pressed my hand again and let it go. I waited for her to march across the yard to Nana and tell her about everything. My visits. That first drive to the hospital. But she didn’t. She kept her eyes on the dome, a glazed expression on her face.

  “I can’t get over this,” she said, finally.

  I watched a slight grin form on her lips.

  “Over what?” I asked.

  “The way you live out here.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  She brought a fist up to her mouth and blew into it.

  “You know, I actually thought about studying architecture in college,” she said. “Just for a little while. I never did it, but I was interested. I took this great appreciation class, slides and slides of beautiful buildings. In the end, I didn’t have the math skills.”

  Janice’s face remained locked in concentration, like she was seeing the dome again for the first time. “But the artistic part appealed to me. Your grandmother designed this, right?”

  “She did,” I said.

  We both watched my grandmother, who was now wiping off a smudge of paint with her index finger. Her fingertip skated slowly along the edge of a triangle.

  “Amazing,” she said. “She must be really proud of everything she’s done.”

  “She is.”

  Jared’s hands pounded against the glass. Janice glanced at his window. Her smile disappeared. “I guess that’s my cue,” she said, and laughed nervously. She took a step toward the door and grabbed the handle.

  “What did you end up studying?” I asked.

  “Studying?”

  “In college.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I wanted to be a teacher of some kind. But I never finished.”

  She opened the door to the van. I thought she was going to get in, but she turned around again. “I took . . . an indefinite break,” she said.

  She looked down at the ground, then she entered the van. Jared shouted something at her, but I couldn’t make out the words. She closed the door behind her. I could just barely distinguish her features through the tinting, but she seemed pensive. She put the car in drive, but before she drove away, she rolled down the window.

  “We hope to see you soon, Sebastian,” she said.

  She didn’t smile this time. She just rolled the window back up and pulled out of the driveway. Then the teal van was coasting down the hill, sending up a cloud of bright white exhaust, like a long winter breath. I watched it wind through the switchbacks toward town. When it was out of sight, I went back and rejoined Nana.

  “What was the delay?” she asked.

  “They were interested in the new project,” I said. “I gave them all the details I could supply.”

  “Are they going to return?” she asked.

  “I think so.”

  “The word continues to spread!” she said. “All we need is a . . . point of entry into the collective consciousness! You’ll see. You’ll see how it works.”

  “I believe you,” I said.

  I picked up my paintbrush from the cold ground and started work on the intricate crescent of the South Shetland Islands. Painted green, the South Pole didn’t look at all cold and forbidding. Maybe that’s what Nana liked about it. This version was not Shackleton’s country of frostbite and starvation. It looked like a nice place for a picnic, actually. Or some camping. Somewhere you could just stroll the verdurous hills for days, jumping from island to island. Swimming in three oceans in the same day. It looked, above all else, like a good place to be alone.

  14.

  Experiments in Rocking

  AS IT TURNED OUT, I WAS NOT A NATURAL AT THE bass guitar. I wish I could say that I awakened a secret talent in the echo chamber of our storage shed. I wish I could say I was even good at not-playing-it in a memorably deficient way (like the framed Mr. Vicious, perhaps). But these statements would both be untruths. The fact was I had long maladroit fingers that tripped over one another on the way to a chord. I seemed to have no sense of internal rhythm. And my fingertips felt like they were on fire after minutes of playing. Yet every night for the next three days, I practiced like Jared requested. I worked on the Geoscope with Nana by day; I snuck out to practice bass by night. I had no earthly idea what I was doing.

  The whole ritual was made worse, perhaps, by the fact that I tried to listen to and comprehend a new punk composition each night before I went to the shed. After an e-mail to Jared requesting songs that had particularly agreeable bass lines, I received a flurry of suggestions. And so I pressed my ear to the circle of holes on the computer monitor that functioned as speakers, and listened carefully to the tunes I found on the Web. I hoped I might learn them by rote, humming and internalizing night after night. But often-times the bass parts started the songs, and then disappeared under a blanket of guitar and screaming. Then I was left to puzzle over the words.

  We’re gonna steal your mail on a Friday night.

  We’re gonna steal your mail by the pale moonlight.

  Bitchin’ Camaro, Bitchin’ Camaro!

  I ran over my neighbors.

  All the girls are in love with me.

  I’m a teenage lobotomy!

  Despite the baffling lyrics, I was continually amazed by the musicianship. The bassists played so fast and the screams were exceptionally well-timed. By the time I got out to the storage shed, sitting on the cold seat of my Voyager, I felt my hands freeze up entirely. I heard the pounding bass parts in my head, deep notes that filled my whole body with hum. But all that came out of my bass were anemic clunks and clonks. I went to bed each night, trying not to think about how deficient I was at Punk Rocking. It was all I could do not to weep.

  On my fourth night of practicing, though, I had my first small triumph. I had been thumping around for nearly an hour when I finally managed to produce a perfect-sounding A minor chord. One finger on the ninth fret of the D string. One on the twelfth fret of the A. One on the twelfth fret of the E. And then out it came: a long and sustained sound that seemed to fill the entire shed with harmony. I just listened until it faded completely from the air. I looked down at my fingers. They were in perfect position. Each of the three fingertips pressing the strings without touching and dulling the sound of another. I strummed again and again and the chord rang through the air, echoing off the metal slats in the shed. I saw it as a sign to stop for the
night. I carefully wrapped the bass up tight in the mesh to keep it warm, and went directly inside.

  In the dome, everything was cozy and tea-smelling. Geodesic domes are efficient structures to heat. They are also adept at imprisoning smells. And the more time I spent away from the dome, the more I was starting to notice the strange odor of our home. Steamed vegetables. Aromatic candles. The pungent paint fumes. I kept hearing the chord in my head, as I cut through the fog of scents. A chord on any instrument, it occurred to me, was a prime example of the concept of synergy. Synergy is the cooperation of two different agents to produce an effect greater than their individual parts—i.e., two notes played together to form a pleasing sound. Synergistic music!

  I gravitated toward the cordless phone and picked it up. I dialed Meredith’s private number with my blistered fingertips. It rang only once this time before her perfectly apathetic “What?” shot through the phone like a threat.

  “Hello,” I said, modulating my voice back to the same half whisper I had used before.

  “You,” she said. “You again.”

  “How does it work?” I asked. “What you told me before.”

  “Why would I tell you now?” she asked. “Why would I tell some chump who hung up on me? Somebody I don’t even know.”

  In the past I would have believed she was angry, but I knew her telephone voice better now. I could actually hear the smile spreading on her lips.

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’m shy.”

  “I don’t have time for that,” she said.

  “Maybe I made a mistake.”

  “Hell yes, you did. You made a huge mistake. Nobody hangs up on me. I decide when the conversation is over.”