The House of Tomorrow

by Peter Bognanni

  I had been successful at blocking her out, of recent, but that didn’t mean she would disappear completely. And it didn’t mean that everyone else was keeping Nana shut away, too. I realized these things fully the next evening after dinner. There were two days left before the contest, and as I cleared the table, I was already thinking about band practice. Meredith was rinsing plates for the dishwasher, and each time I brought a new load from the table, she greeted me with a small closed-lip smile. I piled the dishes in the sink beneath her, and tried not to catch any mist from the spray head.

  My orbit was very small that night. Nearly everything was happening in my head. I wasn’t much aware of the external, so when Janice touched me on the shoulder, I was brought back to reality in a rush. I dropped a bowl of green beans and the stray leftovers bounced off the carpet like grasshoppers. The bowl stayed in one piece.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “That’s okay.”

  I bent down to scoop up my mess, one bean at a time. She hesitated for a second, watching me, but I could tell she had something else to say. She came out with it when all the beans were back in their bowl.

  “I’d like to go for a walk if that’s okay with you.”

  I looked up at her from below. Her smile slackened.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “You can leave the rest for Meredith,” she said.

  She took the bowl gently from my hands and rested it back on the table. Only minutes ago we had all been joking at the table over a story Meredith told about dissecting cows’ eyes in her biology class. That levity was completely gone now.

  “Jared’s waiting upstairs for his lesson,” I said.

  “He can keep waiting,” she said.

  I followed her to the closet by the front door and donned my coat. I was wearing Jared’s pants again, so I pulled my socks up this time before stepping out into the cold. I stuffed my hands in my pockets. It was getting dark early now, and even though I had noticed this before, I was surprised anew when Janice and I stood on the porch.

  “Oh,” she said, just after stepping out, “look at that.”

  I looked where she was pointing and saw a small metal angel lying on the smooth concrete of the porch. We both glanced up. The angel had come unclasped from the wind chime. Janice scooped it up with a mittened hand and held it up to try to reattach it, but it was broken. She eventually surrendered the metal silhouette to her jacket pocket. The other angels held still on their rungs. They did not clang. Janice stepped off the porch and hiked toward the sidewalk. I caught up to her and walked by her side.

  We didn’t speak for the first couple of blocks. She took faster strides than I did, walking with a contagious sense of purpose, and I felt myself scrambling to keep up. The air was misty. Not enough to really affect my vision, but just enough to make the streets I’d only recently walked with Meredith seem a touch unfamiliar. The trees disappeared into a gray broth of sky at the top, so it was hard to tell how high they went up. It could have been miles. I was looking up when Mrs. Whitcomb finally started talking.

  “I’ve been asking myself a lot of questions lately, Sebastian,” she said.

  She kept walking, just a step ahead of me.

  “What kind of questions?” I asked.

  “Questions about a lot of things. But mostly about you.”

  I started to feel a little anxious. And I had the irrational thought that I wouldn’t be returning to the Whitcombs’ house after this walk. I was sure of it suddenly, and I felt the urge to turn around and sprint back.

  “I’ve been asking myself what my intentions are. And if . . . I’m really helping you at all.”

  I felt my feet clapping the sidewalk. I was starting to speed up.

  “Well, you shouldn’t have . . . doubts about that, Mrs. Whitcomb,” I said, faster than I wanted to. “You’ve done so much. I can’t even tell you.”

  She listened to me, but I could tell she was not going to be pushed from her intended path. She waited for me to cease talking, and picked up where she had left off.

  “I had always thought I could do something for you. I wanted to reunite you with your grandmother, and help you find a way to work through your difficulties. I thought I could do it. But I forgot all about that for a while. I was distracted. I’ve been so distracted lately. And it was good to see you and Jared so close.”

  She was quiet a moment, possibly imagining Jared and me together.

  “But I need to wake up,” she said. “I’ve been in this kind of trance the past few years, just letting everything happen to me. I need to trust myself to make some decisions, even if they’re hard ones. Maybe I’m not explaining this very well, but it’s what I’ve been thinking about.”

  I started to formulate a response to all this in my head. But before I could utter something out loud, she leveled me.

  “I met with your grandmother,” she said.

  I waited for the information to set in. But it didn’t really. I found myself unable to imagine the circumstances in which this would have happened.

  “You went to my house?” I said.

  “I did,” she said. “I’ve been trying to call for the last week, but she never picks up. The one time she did, she called me some unpleasant names without even listening to me. So I drove over and knocked on her door. Your door.”

  I still couldn’t picture it. I couldn’t see Nana springing to life from her bed and coming to answer. I couldn’t see her inviting Janice in.

  “Your house is a map of the world now, Sebastian. Did you know that?”

  “The Geoscope,” I said. “Is it completed?”

  “I think so,” she said. “She told me she was planning a second coat on a few countries, but that was basically it. It looked like a real globe. It was breathtaking in its own way, really. An accomplishment.”

  We were a good five blocks from the Whitcomb house now. Everything behind us was encased in brume. The mist felt cold on my exposed skin.

  “She misses you,” said Janice. “She wants you to come home.”

  “She said that?”

  Janice touched me again. This time on the back. I felt a lump rising in my throat. Suddenly, it dawned on me why Nana would have let her in the dome. Me. She was hoping for some information about me. She had gotten to the point where she would welcome strangers into our house to see if they knew anything.

  “She never really intended for you to leave,” said Janice. “Maybe for an afternoon. She told me that her moods have been uncontrollable. And she told me about the newspaper article. It hurt her more than you could believe, Sebastian. She felt like her whole life had been called fraudulent. Like all her ambitions had been trampled in that moment.”

  I thought back to that day. Her exhausted eyes. Her crumpled body under the blanket, sitting on the dirty ground. I tried to shake the image free.

  “I’ll be going back to a world of isolation,” I said. “You know that, right? That’s where she’s asking me to return. That’s what . . . you’re asking.”

  Janice stopped walking. We were all alone in the street, between two sidewalks. When she looked at me, I could see that her eyes were moistening.

  “I can talk to her about that,” she said. “She just . . . doesn’t remember what it’s like to have a teenager. I’m sure if we just talk all of this over . . .”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I know I can’t stay with you. I understand that.”

  She sighed, and backtracked a couple of steps. She pulled her hat down tighter over her braid. “She’s your guardian,” she said. “She has great plans for you.”

  She was sniffling now. That resolute quality I had heard in her voice in the last day was disappearing again.

  “Does Jared know?” I asked.

  She shook her head and paused a moment. “Just Meredith,” she said.

  “M
eredith knows?”

  “She wanted to see the dome. She was curious. She waited in the car while I went in to meet with your . . . Nana. She wanted to see where you lived.”

  “How long has she known?”

  “We went yesterday after school.”

  I thought about the poster. Her apology. Her smile. It was all pity. She knew I was being taken from her world. Sent back to my “eccentric” life on the town’s fringe. For now I couldn’t bring myself to think about everything I would be going back to. And everything I was going to miss. It was too overwhelming. Instead I had to buy some time, hold off the inevitable just a little longer.

  “I’ll go back next week,” I said. “Give me the rest of this one.”

  Janice breathed into her mittens to warm them.

  “I’m not sure your grandmother is going to agree with that.”

  “Please,” I said. “Give me time . . . to tell Jared. I can’t just leave him like this.”

  I knew I was being manipulative now, but I couldn’t help it.

  “I don’t want him to think I’m just walking out on him.”

  She seemed to consider this deeply. I didn’t know if she was thinking about her husband, but the pained expression was back on her face. She breathed again into her mittens. They smoked with frozen air.

  “Friday,” she said.

  I watched her closely.

  “Friday, I’ll take you back. That gives you two days to tell Jared. I’ll talk to him when you’re done. I’ll tell him there was nothing else we could do.”

  “All right,” I said. “Friday.”

  She came up to me then and gave me a hug. She hadn’t hugged me since I had moved in. Only those few times before, when she was trying to save my soul. I let myself be enveloped in her tan wool coat. It scratched against my cheek. It felt good. And I realized I couldn’t blame her for any of this. She had already done much more than I expected. She had a host of her own difficulties. This was my problem alone.

  “She thinks you’re going to save the world,” said Janice.

  “I know,” I said.

  She let go, and the warmth of her coat left me.

  “I wish someone had thought that about me,” she said.

  We fell into stride and were silent the rest of the walk back. When I looked at Janice, I got a sad smile, so I stopped looking. I just concentrated on my feet, laying down one shoe after another. My orbit had opened and spanned the globe, or at least all of North Branch.

  When I finally made it inside and up the stairs, Jared was waiting with his math book open and his headphones on. He was studying by himself, sitting cross-legged, muttering words too loudly. He couldn’t hear himself over the music pounding in his ears. I listened to him read: “Octagon. Nonagon. Decagon.”

  He didn’t notice as I entered the room.

  “A triangle is the only polygon that is coplanar . . . coplanar. What the hell is coplanar?”

  “It means lying in the same plane,” I said.

  Jared looked up, startled. He plucked a white headphone out of his ear.

  “Man,” he said, “you scared me. I thought God was finally answering a question of mine. All this time and he finally decides to give me a geometry answer.”

  “It’s just me,” I said.

  He squinted behind his glasses.

  “Your nose is red,” he said. “It looks like the end of a dick.”

  “I went for a walk.”

  “That’s great. Some people have to pass math placement tests so they don’t end up in Special Ed. But, you know, walking is great exercise.”

  I lay back on the bed and looked up at the ceiling. There were only a precious few nights left before my view would be the Arctic Circle, with trees and stars above it. I had just been getting used to the white paint of Jared’s ceiling.

  “Have you asked your mom if we can play in the talent contest yet?”

  “I’m waiting for the right time,” he said.

  He closed the book and took the other headphone from his ear.

  “I was wondering today,” he said.

  “Everyone seems to be wondering,” I said.

  “Don’t interrupt me.”

  He closed his eyes a moment.

  “I was wondering why you aren’t going back to school along with me.”

  “Impossible,” I said.

  “Why! You’re not being homeschooled anymore, so you should go to school when I do. What are you going to be, some kind of creepy-ass vagrant who wanders around and bothers people?”

  “No, but . . .”

  “Listen,” he interrupted. “At least then we’d each have a goddamn ally. That’s all you need really to survive in high school, I think, is one other person. Someone you can talk to while you walk down the hall. Without an ally, you’re a target.”

  “Jared, I’m not sure that can work.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  I froze. We still had to practice for the show. That was the only thing left that I cared about. If I said something now, the whole night would be shot.

  “I think only a guardian can register me for school,” I said hesitantly.

  He adjusted his glasses. “Well, I’ll go get Janice to take care of it, then. I’ll do it right now if it’s such a big damn deal.”

  He got up from the bed and started toward the door.

  “Wait,” I said.

  He turned around.

  “Talk to her about the talent show first. You don’t want to overwhelm her. Don’t request everything at once.”

  He looked out and down the hallway.

  “Maybe you’re right. I don’t want her brain to explode.”

  “Let’s just practice tonight,” I said. “Talk to her tomorrow.”

  “What about geometry?” asked Jared. “We’ve got one more chapter.”

  I followed his eyes to the bright blue book, sitting in the middle of the bed. I knew I didn’t have another lesson in me. It was all too cold and meaningless. I needed more than ever to play some loud music and not think of anything else. If I had possessed the power to do it, I would have wiped geometry off the planet. Poof! No more angles. No more vertices. No universal patterns for all mankind. Instead, I just shrugged and said, “Fuck geometry.”

  Jared looked at me, his brow raised. He eventually smiled.

  “Too bad we don’t need another song,” he said. “That would be a killer title.”

  “Jared,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I’d like to go to school with you. Don’t think I wouldn’t. That’s not . . . what I meant to convey.”

  “I know,” he said. “I get it. Nothing ever goes the way I want it to. I know how life works by now.”

  He set about plugging in his guitar, letting the hair hang over his glasses as he twiddled knobs on the amplifier. I watched his fingers move deftly over the controls, putting everything back in a perfect balance.

  28.

  On the Verge of Something

  BY MIDAFTERNOON THE NEXT DAY, NOTHING HAD been determined. The issue of the performance had not been raised. Our songs still needed improvement. And Jared’s condition was tenuous. We had a little over twenty-four hours until our hypothetical performance, and we were mired in confusion and doubt. But that didn’t stop us from piloting the Voyager into downtown North Branch that Wednesday to replace our old posters with the new ones that Meredith had created. Despite the uncertainty of everything else, at least our branding strategy could stay on track. Hype, said Jared, was everything.

  The idea was to wallpaper the town. No post unpostered. We were using full color this time, maximizing all our efforts. Meredith was right about Jared’s undisclosed stash of money. He explained it all to me from the back of my bike. Every time he was in the hospital, his relatives on his dad’s side sent cards laden with cash. They knew about his f
ather’s behavior, and they felt guilty. They assuaged this guilt by parting with crisp twenty-dollar bills. Jared had been saving the money for an escort service. But if our performance was a success, he decided, he might be able to grope some girls who didn’t charge. It was an investment of sorts.

  His hands were steady on my back as I pedaled through a rare mild winter afternoon. The weather seemed to be tempering itself in response to Jared’s health. It must have been in the midforties, but Jared still wore a sweatshirt hood pulled snug over his head. The fabric covered half the lenses of his glasses, but there was a perfect space for his cigarette, which dangled on his lip, the breeze inflaming its embers. He had been trying to cut back on his smoking since the hospital visit, and this was his first cigarette in days. I could tell he was savoring it because every few puffs he actually moaned with pleasure.

  “Ohhh,” he said, after expelling one cloud that made it all the way to my handlebars before whipping past my face. “Tar.”

  We chose to poster parked cars first. Perfecting a quick set of three movements, we lifted the wiper blade with a gloved hand, inserted the overlarge poster, and slapped the blade back with a loud whap! The design faced down so that once you entered your car you’d be greeted with our artwork. Next we set our sights on the small stretches of quaint white fencing that the city had erected around the small public park. On one particular section, we made a continuous row of posters, twenty-five sheets long. Looking over the fencing from across the street, our name seemed to form a chant.

  THE RASH THE RASH THE RASH THE RASH THE RASH.

  After an hour or so, we had less than twenty left, and they needed to be placed in the most strategic of locales. We thought: fast-food restaurants, bar windows, grocery stores. Anything that people utilized daily and in large numbers. We were scouting and discussing when I spotted The Record Collector across the street. Specifically, I spotted the row of posters that lined the tall glass display window.

  “We need one right there,” I said.