“It’s James Osterberg,” he said.
“So what?”
“So you can use all of this as a way to blow immense amounts of smoke up your own ass.”
“I don’t understand.”
He wasn’t looking at me now. “My mom’s right about one thing,” he said. “I can’t let my condition define me. She has a point there, for once. But that doesn’t mean I have to pretend to be someone else entirely. I can’t hide behind all of this band stuff forever. It’s such . . . such an obvious load of bullshit sometimes.”
He stopped talking and just looked out the window into the yard. I wanted to hear more of what he had to say, but I didn’t encourage him to go on. Mainly because I understood some of what he was speaking about. It was extremely easy to get lost in the reverie of creating music and making a new image for yourself. It was even easier to forget about all the real problems you faced, the things that actually made up your days. It could, sometimes, feel like a giant lie.
“But no one knows him by that name,” I said.
“Who?”
“James Osterberg.”
“That’s his name, though.”
“It doesn’t matter. Reality is boring,” I said, “and mean. And he defeated it. Is that so wrong?”
“I don’t know,” said Jared.
I was losing him. I could hear it in his voice. And I wasn’t sure I believed my own argument. I threw the covers down to my feet and I got out of my cot. I found my way over to his spot by the window, and I hunched down right by him.
“I saw my sister kiss you today,” he said. “I was walking by. Are you guys doing the nasty now?”
I perked up and immediately looked away from him.
“No,” I said softly. “It was just that one kiss.”
“Relax,” he said. “There’s obviously nothing I can do about it. And I don’t know if I really care anymore. In a couple of weeks, I’ll be gone all day. Who knows what’s going to happen?”
I held my tongue. When I looked down, Jared was holding something out to me. It was his cigarette. I took it from his fingers, careful not to burn myself.
“She treats you like crap,” he said.
“I’m aware of that,” I said.
I brought the cigarette up to my mouth.
“Don’t smoke the filter this time,” he said.
“I won’t.”
I took in a small bit of smoke, and it came right back out of my lungs in a single husky cough. Jared laughed. He patted me on the back too hard. I brought my head down close to the cold screen, trying for a breath of fresh air. Suddenly, I noticed something outside, up on the largest branch. Two objects, knocking together. Meredith’s track shoes. They were back out there, swaying back and forth. For good luck, if she could be believed. And I decided to believe her that night. Because I needed to. In my mind, they were up there for both Jared and me. I didn’t point them out, though, and I wasn’t sure if Jared noticed. He finished his smoke and closed the window without making a sound.
“Don’t listen to me tonight,” he said. “I’m in a mood.”
He extinguished the cigarette in the bottom of a soda can. Then he turned to me one last time. “I just want something real to happen,” he said. “Can you understand that?”
“Yes,” I said, watching the shoes sway, the laces intertwining, spinning the sneakers slowly around. “I can.”
THE SKY WAS RED WHEN I WOKE UP, ONLY HOURS LATER. I was wide-awake at dawn, the way I used to be on weekend mornings in the dome. I tried to roll over and go back to sleep, but my body would not submit. So, before anyone else was awake, I showered and dressed in my old clothes, which I found in the Whitcombs’ basement, folded in a tight stack on top of the dryer. The blue flannel felt warm and soft against my skin. My old blue jeans fit perfectly, and the cuffs reached all the way down to my shoes. I didn’t put anything in my hair. I just let it flop down in its usual shag. I stared at my old face in the mirror. It was there. Unchanged.
My first real thought of the morning was to go outside, get on my bike, and ride off somewhere completely new. Just follow the highway and decamp from town altogether. Now would be the time to do it. No note. No good-byes. As far as I could remember, I had never journeyed out of North Branch. My parents might have taken me places when I was really young, but they were not around to ask anymore. So it was up to me to make some new memories. Maybe Meredith would even accompany me. She seemed just as weary of her life here as I was. The two of us could have adventures. Sid and Nancy. Sleeping in alleys, panhandling in the streets. We could forgo the heroin and the murder, but we would still live completely for ourselves.
I decided to make some scrambled eggs first. I went into the kitchen and began pulling ingredients from the fridge. Eggs. Tabasco. Butter. Cream. Then I located a tube of cinnamon rolls in a bottom drawer, some strips of meat that looked vaguely familiar. I started on the eggs first, and once I began breaking them into the deep metal bowl, I didn’t cease until the whole carton was swimming in the bottom. Twelve orange eyes gaping at me. I added the other ingredients that Jared had showed me and poured the whole mixture into a skillet. I put all the meat in a wide frying pan and turned on another burner. I divided up the rolls with a butter knife and spaced them out on a tray like it instructed on the packaging. In ten minutes, I had everything cooking at once. It felt like a small miracle.
Janice was the first to come into the kitchen. Her hair was down and frizzing all over the place, and her eyes were only half open. She wore a long jersey nightgown that reached down to her knees. It took her a few seconds to even notice I was there.
“Sebastian,” she said when she saw me. “Oh. What’s going on?”
“Breakfast,” I answered.
She wandered up behind me and squinted at the eggs, firming in the pan, and the meat, just starting to pop in its fat.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Sit down.”
She didn’t say anything else. She just walked over to the fridge, dispensed herself some orange juice and then took a seat at the dining room table. Soon the cinnamon rolls started to fill the kitchen with an oversweet fragrance. It mixed with the smell of the salty meat to make the best breakfast smell I had ever been in the presence of. Bacon. The word suddenly came back to me. I had eaten it once, before I lived with Nana. A distant memory of the taste came soon after, and I started to salivate. I flipped the strips with a fork, dodging the grease splatters. Janice watched me calmly from the table, taking satisfied sips of juice from a plastic tumbler.
Jared was the next to arrive. He walked into the room, his glasses on crooked, without a shirt. I hadn’t seen his scar since the first time he showed me in his room. It wasn’t quite as shocking this time. Just a line down his chest. Didn’t everybody have one? I returned to the eggs. They were almost complete. Not yet brown. Nearly the perfect texture. Jared sat down next to his mother and removed the sleep from his eyes with his middle finger. He was totally silent.
Meredith emerged last, just as I was dividing up the eggs onto four plates. She was already dressed for school. Her hair was down like her mother’s except over her eyes, where she’d clipped it back with a metal pin. She wore her full makeup and a skintight orange sweater and jeans. Her phone was to her ear. But when she came in and took stock of the quiet surroundings, she hung up. She sat down across from Jared just as I put the eggs and bacon on the table. The rolls were finished, too, but they needed to be iced. So I stayed at the stove while the Whitcombs gradually started to dine.
They ate quickly, which I interpreted as a compliment. I had mastered Jared’s recipe after only one try. Or, at the very least, I had made a passable facsimile. I had yet to taste anything, but I could tell for certain that I had done a top-rate job with the rolls. Their scent was fantastic, and when I cut one in half, the consistency was perfect. Moist, but not too doughy. I iced each one with the back of a spoon and a large packet of frosting. Then I
delivered them to the table and sat down in the one empty chair. We were all gathered now. I couldn’t remember a time when we had eaten breakfast together.
Meredith spoke first. “Mom,” she said, chewing a piece of roll. “Here’s the deal.”
Janice looked up from her plate.
“I think you should let them play at the talent show tonight,” she said.
Janice made a noise.
“Now hear me out. Just listen,” she said. “Jared is feeling better, okay. That’s clear enough. He’s taking his meds. And they’ve been practicing all week. Personally, I think they’re terrible, but they seem determined. And if you know anything about your son, you should know that this is really the only thing that he enjoys. And he doesn’t enjoy much of anything, so that’s saying something.”
When she was done speaking, Meredith instantly shoved half a piece of bacon in her mouth and looked down at the table. Jared watched his sister, his fork frozen in midair. Janice looked at both Jared and me, one at a time. Her eyes rested on Jared’s scar.
“I don’t know,” she said. “You make a good argument, but you have to understand that I’m making the decisions of a nurse here, not just a mother. His health comes first, no matter what.”
I waited for Jared to make a biting remark, but he stayed silent. Meredith looked at me. I wiped at my mouth spasmodically with a flowered napkin.
“Mrs. Whitcomb,” I said. “I don’t want anything to happen to Jared. I really don’t. But you can’t make him live in fear all the time. He has to be able to . . . risk action. That’s part of being human. Taking risks.”
“There are degrees of risks,” she said. “I don’t want him risking his life.”
I thought for sure Jared would say something in his own defense now, but instead he took a mouthful of eggs and spoke up with his mouth full.
“This is a great breakfast,” he said. “I think we should just sit here and enjoy Sebastian’s breakfast. I’m proud of the guy. I really am. Look what he did. He cooked a normal American breakfast. Like a pro. He’s like thirty percent less of a freak today.”
He raised a glass of orange juice to me then continued eating. No one said anything else. Aside from some extra rolls, the food was almost gone. It was nearly time to disband and go about our days. The last Whitcomb day I would be a part of. Jared was the only one who didn’t know that now. I thought it might be a good time to tell him. But before I could reveal this information, Janice reached over and put her hands on his. He looked at her, puzzled. And when she broke down crying, he tried at first to remove his hand. The tears came out of nowhere. One moment, she was blank-faced, the next there were streams down her cheeks.
“I’m just trying to do the right thing,” she sobbed. “Don’t you see that?”
Jared tried to back up his chair, but Janice didn’t let go. He looked at their hands.
“I know you are, Mom,” he said. “I know.”
She gripped his hand harder.
“I don’t know what to do. I have to make all the decisions myself now, and it’s not easy. It’s not. No one tells you how to prepare for these things. No one can tell you how it works. I can’t take it anymore.”
Meredith scooted closer to her mother. She rested a hand on her wrist.
“It’s okay, Mom,” she said. “You’re doing a great job. We love you.”
Each had a hand on Janice now. She looked down at her plate of half-eaten eggs. She blinked out another tear.
“Your father’s been calling for you, Jared,” she said. “I didn’t tell you because I thought it was going to hurt you. But you’re old enough to make your own choices about it. He wants to talk, if you want to call him.”
Jared took off his glasses and put them on the table. His expression was hard to read. His brow was knitted, but after a second or two, it relaxed.
“Okay,” he said, looking at her. “Thanks for telling me, Mom.”
I sat watching them from my spot at the table. And I felt at that moment like I was spying on their private lives. For the first time, I felt a great distance away, like I was looking in at them through their windows. It was an odd sense of displacement. I couldn’t believe that they had ever taken me in at all. Maybe they had wanted me to live with them as a buffer, or a distraction. Or maybe they just wanted to appease Jared. But there was something between them that I couldn’t share. I wasn’t even sure I was in the room anymore.
And at the moment of my invisibility, that brief minute or two when they were together, I had a flash of metaphysical communication with Nana. At least I thought that’s what it might be. I was sitting there, watching Mrs. Whitcomb being consoled by her children, then I went inside my own head. That blank white space opened up and in that feeling of nonexistence, I saw Nana lying in her bed, enclosed in the Geoscope. She was not facedown the way she was the night I saw her in the dome. This time, she was on her side. There was a pile of letters next to her on the bed, and she was reading one of them out loud. Just a whisper, but for at least ten seconds, I heard every word.
“. . . and I can guarantee you that it is not my child. My wife and I have been unable to conceive for some time. So please think carefully before contacting me again . . .”
I caught a quick glimpse of the room around her. There were tea cups everywhere, with tea bags dangling from the side, or sitting in stained pools on her nightstand. Her hot water bottle was out on the carpet. She was still in her union suit, and her hair was not shaped into the round bouffant she favored. I was seeing her first from in the room, but as the scene began to fade back to white, I left the room through the ceiling, being sucked out of the dome and into the cosmos. I was both outside and inside. External and internal at the same time. Then everything was white again and I was sitting back in the Whitcombs’ kitchen. Janice was still holding Jared’s hand, and she was repeating herself.
“You can play,” she was saying. “If you really feel up to it, you can play, Jared. Things are going to get back to normal around here. I swear they are. Just watch. You’ll see.”
30.
Guitar Gods of North Branch
THE PHILOSOPHY OF BUCKMINSTER FULLER AND THE philosophy of punk rock are not as separate as they may seem at first. I considered this anew while I waited for Jared to finish a practice quiz in his geometry book that afternoon. Once, the two modes of thought seemed as contrasting to me as humanly possible; now I wasn’t so sure. For example, both Fuller and the original practitioners of punk believed in the power of the individual over all else. Both had distrust for big corporations, big religions, and the government. Both had a do-it-yourself motto. If something wasn’t out there in the world that needed to be, whether it was a new sound or a new form of housing, you were supposed to do it yourself. It is only those who dared to do something different who made real contributions to life and art. In this context, it is very possible that Bucky was a punk rocker in spirit.
And this was, perhaps, where Nana had gotten it wrong. Instead of allowing me to figure things out for myself, to explore life, she had kept me in a bubble filled only with her ideas. Ideas she had culled straight from Fuller. But Bucky didn’t want his ideas to be taught this way. In the 1930s, when some of his inventions were starting to catch on, he noticed he was fast becoming something of a guru. He was being followed around by groups of people who took everything he said as doctrine. Thus, he made a resolution on New Year’s, 1933, to discourage any blind followers by being as awful to them as possible. By cursing them and acting like a buffoon in their presence, Bucky believed he would ultimately be doing them a favor. No one should see another human being as having all the answers. Even if that person was Buckminster Fuller.
I felt, for the first time, like I might finally be ready to discuss some of these ideas with Nana. If we couldn’t tell each other the truth, then there was no way we would be able to live together anymore. Seeing her in my head at the bre
akfast table that morning had made it clear to me that it was time to return home again. Whether it was clairvoyant communication or just another guilty visual floating around my brain, it was time to check back in and talk about my path once more. There was only one thing left to do before that could happen. And the moment of truth was fast approaching.
The afternoon was already half over and we needed to arrive at the church early to set up our gear. Nervous energy was beginning to build up in me in a severe way. My stomach was tight. My temples pounded. And I had caught myself holding my breath a couple of times for absolutely no reason. I could tell that Jared was starting to think ahead, too. He wasn’t concentrating on his quiz. He was doodling in the margins, and skipping any question that gave him trouble. He’d only been working on the problems for twenty minutes or so, but the last ten had been completely silent. Finally he launched his pencil across the room. It bounced off the wall, leaving a gray mark on his D.Y.I. poster.
“Damn!” he said.
“What?”
“We need one last song,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about it, and I know I’m right. I’m absolutely right about this.”
“We need to practice the songs we have.”
“Balls to that,” he said. “What if we have to play an encore?”
“There’s no time to write another song.”
“We won’t write one,” he said.
He threw the geometry book from his lap and hopped off the bed. He moved over to a pile of discs, stacked in an unwieldy tower near his closet. He sat down cross-legged on the floor and started weeding through them. In a second, CDs were winging over his shoulder and landing behind him.
“Why are you throwing everything today?” I asked.
He kept sorting until he got to the case he wanted. I recognized the cover from a distance. He opened it up to make sure the actual disc was inside, then he tossed it to me. I managed to trap it against my chest.
“Track five,” he said. “Play it.”
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