The House of Tomorrow

by Peter Bognanni

  “I need to be with someone,” she said.

  I watched her from the doorway. “Do you want me to get in the bed?” I asked.

  The words sounded strange coming from my mouth.

  “I think so,” she said.

  My feet were soundless on the carpeting. I could just barely make out the small piles of CDs on the floor to avoid them.

  “What about the things Jared said?” I asked. “About me and you?”

  I hesitantly slipped under the covers, adjusting the sheet over me.

  “Let’s not talk about that,” she said. “Let’s not talk at all, for a minute.”

  She backed up and I felt the heat from her body. It radiated off her back. I held my hand out, close to her skin, and I could feel the change in temperature. I moved closer until my chest was barely touching the back of her shirt. She grabbed my arm and slung it around her waist. I left it there, my wrist half balancing on the point of her hip.

  “Don’t go to sleep,” she said.

  “I won’t.”

  Her stomach rose and fell with her breathing, taking my arm with it. She spoke again, so quietly. “I don’t sleep with them,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “The guys who come to my room.”

  “You don’t . . .”

  “We don’t screw. I don’t screw them.”

  “Oh.”

  “We do other things.”

  “I see.”

  My whole body felt like a bass string, humming. She moved her head on the pillow and her hair brushed against my chin. It tickled, but I didn’t want to move.

  “I’m going to talk about myself for a minute,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  “I’m just warning you because people are always talking about themselves. It feels good, though. That’s why they do it.”

  She paused.

  “Except you. You’re a listener, Sebastian. You’re the only real listener I’ve ever met. You take it all in. I don’t know if I like you yet, but I like that part.”

  She rolled onto her back and looked up at the ceiling.

  “I’m still afraid of the dark at the age of seventeen,” she said. “There. It feels good to say that out loud. I’m afraid of the damn dark. God, it’s true. But it’s not the dark itself, I guess. It’s just that the dark leaves me alone with these thoughts that I don’t like. And they pop back up. The daytime keeps them down pretty well. So does talking, I guess.”

  She grabbed on to my hand.

  “It’s part of the reason for the . . . boys, too, I guess. They’re so boring most of the time. Just so, so dull. But it’s nice to be touched. That’s another thing that keeps me distracted. Being touched. Like right now. It helps. I don’t know why. But it does.”

  She rolled over toward me and then she was in my arms. I could feel her small breasts against my chest. Her forehead was touching mine.

  “That’s all I want to say.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Now I’m starting to fall asleep,” she said.

  “Go ahead.”

  She kept her eyes closed. Her body relaxed. She stayed that way for nearly a minute before she spoke again.

  “Did you actually mean those things you said to me on the phone?”

  “I did,” I said.

  “I’ll choose to believe you tonight . . .”

  She yawned and her voice drifted off. She was moving farther into my arms. I leaned down and gave her a kiss on the forehead. Her eyes opened and she was awake again. “I can’t,” she said.

  She whipped the covers off and put a foot on the carpet.

  “I can’t sleep here,” she said. “Janice will be back in the morning.”

  She put the other foot down and walked right to the door. She stopped in the doorway. I sat up, my back against the wall.

  “Just don’t say anything else,” she said. “Just don’t.”

  “I want to ask about Jared,” I said.

  “What about him?”

  “How often does this kind of thing occur? This thing that’s happening.”

  “Only once before,” she said.

  “And he was treated?”

  “He was. They’ll give him a biopsy and then probably he’ll be on an IV all night. Normally that takes care of it. Normally.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “Is that all?”

  “It is,” I lied. I wanted to say half a million things. I wanted to scream into the quiet neighborhood cul-de-sac.

  “Good night,” I said.

  She didn’t answer. Without even a look back, she crept out the door and slowly closed it behind her. I waited in the dark for it to open again. But it didn’t, and after a minute or two, I got up and activated Jared’s stereo. I’d seen him operate it enough now to know how to turn it on. I placed a record on the turntable in the dark and started it spinning around. At the last moment, though, I was scared to damage his needle. It was enough just to hear the static as the record revolved around. I lay down next to the speaker and listened to the hisses and pops. It sounded like the air around me had come alive.

  24.

  Familiar Ghosts

  EVER SINCE MY FIRST NIGHT AT THE CHURCH, LONG ago, when Nana seemed to know where I’d been, I had been trying to avoid the subject of her metaphysical powers. I didn’t want to consider the real possibility of her telepathic abilities. It was paralyzing. But I realized, after what had happened with Jared, that I needed to start facing the facts more often. I needed to consider the difficult things in life before they snuck up on me.

  So, the next morning I sat in the kitchen making toaster pastries and contemplating brain waves. Nonverbal communication. Patterns and signals. In the brief quietude of the early morning, I thought of Nana again, alone in the dome, and I wondered if she was trying to communicate with me. If she was right, and it was my destiny to take her place, shouldn’t I be capable of this kind of communication? Bucky believed he was able to telepathically connect with his infant daughter only days after her birth. So there must be some hereditary component.

  I tried, in the Whitcombs’ kitchen, to empty my head of everything that made me resist my powers. I tried to calibrate the rhythms of my thoughts to those beyond the realm of the senses. I didn’t know how to do this necessarily, so I just tried to concentrate on something blank. The color white. I saw it as an empty space in my head, and kept it there, waiting for it to be filled. I held my head in my hands and sat tight. I whispered Nana’s name to the table. “Nana,” I said, “talk to me. I am attuned.”

  There was a long stretch of silence. Everything in the house seemed too quiet for me. I thought of absolutely nothing, and gradually unrefined images started to form. There was no direct communication—only mental pictures, some moving, some still. Image, Bucky had said, was the root word of imagination. And chances were good that I was simply imagining the scenes that began to form like developing photographs in my consciousness. But there they were all the same. And there was Nana.

  She was on top of the dome. I saw her from far away, but as I waited, she moved closer to me. She was wearing my harness. Suction cups were fastened to her hands and knees. A delicate paintbrush hung in her fingers. Despite the great cold, her face was sunburned pink. Her hair blew wildly in the places it escaped from her hat. She ran the paintbrush in small careful strokes over the farthest reaches of Greenland, where the land met the Arctic Ocean. Then she stopped. She held the brush aloft, and she turned her head slightly, looking up. It felt like she was staring right at me. Another moment and she would start speaking.

  I opened my eyes, and the phone began ringing on the kitchen wall. I jumped up and staggered forward a step or two. I was sure it was her. She had felt my presence and intuited the Whitcombs’ phone number somehow. Nana was calling me home. I grabbed the phone and pressed the p
lastic to my ear. “Hello?”

  “I’m calling from beyond the graaaave,” said the caller.

  “What!”

  “Just kidding. I didn’t croak yet, man. I’m alive as hell.”

  “Jared?”

  “Yes, for God’s sake, man, relax. Do you think I’d call you if I was really a ghost. No way, I’d haunt you while you were on the toilet or something. I’d fly away with the TP.”

  I realized I was clutching the phone white-knuckled with my right hand. I loosened my grip. “I thought you were Nana,” I said.

  “Well, I’m not. Get over it.”

  I breathed a little easier. “Are you . . . better?”

  “Kind of,” he said. “I don’t know. They’ve been giving me atomic bombs of immunosuppressives. I feel like a big fat water balloon full of meds right now. I could probably pee out of my eyes if I tried hard enough.”

  It was pleasing to hear his voice, but I didn’t know what to say to him. I could already feel the irritation growing in spite of my best efforts to quell it. Part of me had never expected to hear from him again.

  “Meredith is pissed, I bet,” he said.

  “She is,” I said, passively.

  “Yeah, Janice is in a fury, too. She’s not really speaking to me, except to make sure I’m still breathing. She brought me a milkshake from McDonald’s this morning and almost threw it at me.”

  He laughed longer than usual at his own joke. Then he cleared his throat just to fill the silence. “What?” he said. “What is it with you? I still haven’t forgotten about your betrayal, okay, so don’t start with me. You don’t have a leg to stand on.”

  “I don’t care,” I said. “You’re a major asshole.”

  He exhaled. “Wow,” he said. “Did you really just say that?”

  “What did you think you were trying to accomplish? Why did you stop listening to your doctors?”

  He sighed. “Look,” he said. “I don’t know, entirely. I’ve been talking to a counselor they brought in for me. He asked me if I was trying to off myself.”

  “Were you?”

  “No.”

  “But you knew what would happen if you stopped taking the medication.”

  “I hoped it might be different. I was feeling better. I thought maybe they were dosing me up too much, trying to keep me weak.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Tons of reasons.”

  “Like what?”

  He let out a quick breath. “They don’t want me to take any risks! They just want me to be this bedridden clone all my life.”

  I didn’t speak.

  “That’s how they keep you down,” he said. “This whole country’s on pills. That’s how they turn us into zombies.”

  “You’re being dramatic,” I said. “And foolish.”

  “I was experimenting,” he said.

  I just waited for him to speak again.

  “The experiment failed.”

  Meredith walked into the kitchen without looking at me. Her bare feet squeaked on the linoleum. She wore pajama pants and a T-shirt. Her unwashed hair touched her neck in wisps. I felt a swell of guilt replacing my anger. I had been in a bed with Jared’s sister last night.

  “Hello?” he said. “I just humbled myself. Did you hear it?”

  “I don’t know what to say, Jared, except that today is Friday.”

  “Is it supposed to mean something to me? Because it doesn’t mean something to me.”

  “The talent show is less than one week away. It’s next Thursday.”

  “Oh,” he said. “That thing.”

  “We need practice,” I said. “And we need an additional song. Don’t we? We need two songs. This was all your idea.”

  I tried to gauge Meredith’s reaction. She was standing over the toaster, grabbing a pastry with a paper towel.

  “The band is broken up right now,” Jared mumbled. “In case you forgot.”

  “I didn’t forget,” I said.

  “So,” he said.

  “So what?”

  “So before we can practice, I have to decide whether or not I want to reunite the band. It’s a hard decision. I just can’t make it on the fly. Also, I have to get the hell out of here.”

  “How long are they going to keep you?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Not too much longer. Janice made it clear we don’t have any money. I’m sure they’ll kick us out soon.”

  I heard the sound of voices in his room.

  “Listen,” he said, “I have to go. They’re here to pump me full of zombie drugs again.”

  “Jared,” I said.

  “I have to go.”

  “I’m sorry this is your life,” I said. “I wish I could help you.”

  He was quiet. I heard the phone shuffling against his ear.

  “All right,” he said. “I have to go.”

  “I mean that,” I said.

  “I know,” he said.

  I hung up the phone and walked right by Meredith. I didn’t even give her time to ignore me. I just took the other pastry and walked back upstairs to Jared’s room. I excavated some equipment from the closet and grabbed my bass. I plugged into the amplifier and started practicing the only song I knew. The same notes at a steady rhythm. I played loud, hoping the sound would seep through the floorboards. I wanted the whole house to thrum and vibrate. I turned the volume up until I was sure it was damaging my ears. Then I turned it up further.

  JARED WAS RELEASED LATE THAT AFTERNOON. AROUND three o’clock he was allowed to depart with Janice. I had been upstairs making noise when Meredith received the call. And soon after, she appeared in the doorway, squinting into the room. I stopped playing and Meredith entered. She switched off the amplifier, and all the noise disappeared in an instant, sucked out of the air.

  “He’s on his way,” she said.

  “I see,” I said.

  “He’s still a little out of it,” she said. “So we’re supposed to leave him alone. He has to rest. They barely agreed to let him go.”

  “I’ll begin cleaning up,” I said.

  She moved over to the bed and tossed off the blanket. She peeled off the sheets and wadded them up. She chucked them into the hallway.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “He’ll smell my body spray,” she said. “He’ll know.”

  She didn’t look at me; she just grabbed the sheets and took them downstairs. She came back a minute later with a new set. I helped her stretch them over the mattress. We worked at different ends tugging them tight. Then we replaced the pillowcases and flipped on the humidifier. I turned down the blanket so it looked like the bed was waiting for him. I put away the instruments and arranged his albums in neat piles. The room looked somewhat welcoming.

  “This is good,” she said.

  I assumed she meant the cleaning we had done, but I held out hope that she meant the night before, too. I didn’t ask for clarification. I just walked out behind her and closed the door to Jared’s room. Then we both waited in the living room. Meredith turned on the giant television and sat, unblinking, for the extent of a program about trying to have sexual relations with a stranger. I watched as a line of nude-torsoed men licked whipped cream off a woman’s neck. The woman chirped out the same laugh each time like some kind of stimulated machine. Then she disparaged the men for being “naughty.” She smacked one of them on the buttocks. I tried to gauge if Meredith was entertained by this, or if this was perhaps what she wanted. A line of men by a brilliant turquoise pool. Something sweet sprayed on her neck. Endless human contact.

  She turned off the TV when the front doorknob turned. The screen went black and Jared ambled in, gripping Janice’s arm for balance. They walked in front of the TV, and the contrast was jarring. Where there had just been attractive tan people, now stood Jared. He was pale and drowsy. His skin looked almos
t gray in the harsh daylight of the living room. He needed help getting his sneakers off, and I watched while Janice undid his laces. Jared sat down and seemed to notice us for the first time. He pushed the hair out of the way of his glasses. I saw he was still wearing a hospital bracelet on his wrist.

  “Hey, guys,” he said slowly. “There’s a real party atmosphere in here.”

  Janice frowned at him.

  “We sent the magician home,” said Meredith.

  “Don’t get him started,” said Janice. “He needs sleep.”

  “Yeah,” said Jared. “Don’t get me started. It’s bed rest for me. Maybe a stay in the country to hearten my constitution. The sound of the birds. The fresh manure . . .”

  “He’s on a little morphine,” added Janice.

  She stood him up and walked him through the living room and into the kitchen. I watched him hold Janice’s hand as he gradually climbed the staircase to his room. More than ever before, he looked like a child to me. It was hard to remember sometimes that he was my age. When he was at his most overbearing, he seemed like the ruler of his own small country. The reality was that he was scared sometimes. And he still needed his mother. After he was gone, I sat there on the couch, thinking about all of this. Meredith was quiet, too. She rested cross-legged on a nearby chair. I looked over at her and she snapped out of her brief trance.

  “What do you think I should do?” I asked.

  “About what exactly?”

  She looked uncomfortable for a moment.

  “The band,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said, “that.”

  “Speak honestly,” I said.

  “Honestly,” she said, “I think you’re going to embarrass yourselves. Terribly. And I’d like to be there when it happens.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “But Jared doesn’t care about that,” she added quickly. “Not when it comes to music. He thinks it’s everyone else’s fault if they don’t get it. He’s always been like that. You should hear what he says about the music I like. He never changes his mind.”

  “Janice knows about the stolen bass,” I said. “I imagine she’ll only let me keep it for so long. I think the band is dying.”