The House of Tomorrow (10 page)

After she said this, she reached her hand down and popped the latch to the back of the van. The cold evening air rushed through in an instant and cooled the interior. Janice got out of the car, but it took me a second or two to do the same. She helped me unload my Voyager, and set it gently against the back bumper. Then she wrapped me in another of her hugs. It took me by surprise, but it didn’t bother me once it was occurring. I had only met Janice Whitcomb twice, and both times she had embraced me. It made me wonder how often most families touched.

“I really hope you’ll come to a Youth Group meeting, Sebastian,” she said. “I think you’d like it.”

She released me, and I grabbed a hold of my handlebars. I steadied the bike against my side.

“I’ll try,” I said.

She nodded her head once and then got back into the van. She fastened her seat belt and pulled a great circling U-turn. She sped off, back the way she came, leaving me bewildered at the side of the empty road. I looked at the spot in the gravel where her tires had been. I could still feel the warmth of her coat. I turned and entered the woods.

My heart was beating quickly as I jogged with my bike. Without a second thought, I stopped and removed the spray cans from the basket and tore off the caps. I pressed the triggers and activated them until they were both half empty. In the process, I purposefully let a mist of ivory paint land on my wrists and the tips of my hair to make it appear that I had spent the day working.

And now, in the moonlit dome, the spray paint gleamed in my tiny blond arm hairs like ice crystals. I shook the cans again, knocking the ball bearing around, trying to alert Nana that I was home. She did not stir. The place was soundless. So I knocked on Nana’s door with the end of a paint cylinder. Then I pushed it open without invitation and entered. “Hello, Nana,” I said. “The signs have been altered as you asked.”

Nana was sitting on the floor, a circle of books and papers around her. It took her a moment to realize where she was in the room. She looked outside first, and then spied my reflection in the glass and turned around.

“Sebastian,” she said. “Oh. I’m so glad you’ve returned.”

“You are?”

“Something has happened,” she said.

I noticed now how vacant her eyes appeared. She was looking right past me.

“I have experienced a moment,” she said, and stopped to think. “A moment of prescience.”

“A vision?”

She nodded slowly. “I fell asleep this afternoon,” she said, “and I slept for . . . so long. I thought I had slept for a day. Or a week! All the while I thought that I was dreaming. But, you see, I was not.”

She paused, and I could see her moving her lips, trying to articulate the next part in her head. “I was not dreaming at all,” she said. “I was attuned to the signals of a Greater Intellect.”

She coughed then, and her poise temporarily faltered. “I’m so thirsty,” she said. “Please . . . a glass of filtered water.”

I set down the spray cans and walked, half conscious, out of her room and to the tap where we had long had a state-of-the-art filtration system installed. I rubbed a palm over my painted left wrist. My hairs were stuck together. I recalled the feeling of holding Jared’s electric guitar and how my thin muscles had felt full of some kind of current. But the sensation withered in a moment, and I filled a glass with water. I walked back to Nana’s room. She was lying in her bed now, looking out into the trees. I moved to the side of the bed and held the water out to her.

“Put it to my lips,” she said. “Please. Dispense it.”

I rested the glass on her thin lips and tipped it slightly.

“Nana, do you feel okay?” I asked.

She swallowed huge mouthfuls of water before stopping for a breath.

“From now on,” she gasped, “I think the truth! The Greater Intellect told me that today, just like he told Bucky.”

She drank the rest of the water and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

“I was in this room,” she said, carefully selecting each word, “when the Greater Intellect spoke. It was a low voice. Very quiet. And it told me my life was drawing to a close. It said, ‘Josephine, your time is fleeting, but you must devote the last moments to the highest advantage of others. You must act with great ambition!’ ”

“This happened here?” I asked.

I looked around the room.

“Then I saw an image,” she continued. “Perfectly clear. It was our dome from a great height, Sebastian. I saw it. And it was not the home we live in now. It was not the present version, but . . . a future dome.”

An odd smile formed on her lips.

“What did it look like?” I asked.

“It was a marvelous Geoscope,” she said.

“I don’t know what that is,” I said.

“A globe. A world!”

She sat up and gripped my left shoulder with her long fingers.

“Every single country! Painted to scale on the side of our house. Spaceship Earth realized. And I knew what it meant!” she said.

She gripped harder, and her fingernails dug into my skin.

“It would be a way to remind the people. To remind them about the relationships between human beings and our planet. It would instill a comprehensive worldview in everyone who saw it. And of course, it would be the first location of my institute.”

She spoke the last part quickly, and I almost didn’t catch it.

“Your institute?” I said. “You haven’t even been administering tours, Nana. You’ve barely been speaking until today.”

She was not listening to me, though. She got up off the bed and removed her hand from my shoulder. She sat down in the middle of her papers.

“I’ve been drawing up plans,” she said. “Of course some of our view will have to be . . . obstructed. But that can’t be helped. This is for the highest advantage.”

She picked up a pencil and flipped open her sketch pad. The page was covered in graphite-smeared drawings of our future planet-dome, nestled in the middle of a crosshatched section of woods. North America stretched over the living room. Canada blanketed my room. I sat down on the floor across from Nana. She continued drawing, forming the big toe of southern India over her bedroom.

“Nana,” I said softly, “is it possible that your physician at the hospital might disapprove of this plan?”

Her eyes shot up and stared into mine. A lucidity returned to her gaze.

“Sebastian,” she said, “I end this state of inertia today. Do you understand?”

She held a pencil aloft. It quivered.

“I must embrace the final act. This is the next stage on our paths. And for me, it will be the last. One last thing I can do before the Greater Intellect reclaims me. Do you see? This is everything we’ve been working toward.”

Nana returned to her sketching. Her eyes scanned the thin gray lines of continents and islands. She moistened her dry lips.

“I hope you liked your trip to town today,” she said, her head down. “You’re going to take more of them now. It’s going to be a big responsibility for you. That should make you happy.”

She looked up at me one last time, a slight smile on her face.

“Yes,” I said. “Very happy.”

THAT NIGHT, I WAS NOT ABLE TO SLEEP.

I twisted myself around in my sheets, and by the predawn hours, it felt like my body had entirely disremembered how to slumber. At first, I thought only of Nana and everything she had told me. There was something extremely disquieting and familiar about her story the more I pondered it. Eventually my memory caught up with me, and I realized why her words had bothered me so much. An occurrence similar to hers had happened to Fuller long ago.

The year was 1927, and Bucky had just met with one of many business failures early in his career. Ordinarily, commercial failure was just a temporary setback in the life of a man half blind with curiosity and ambition. But this time he had a wife and a new daughter to support, and he had no income at all. He began avoiding his home, numbing himself with liquor. One evening he wandered down to the shore of Lake Michigan in a self-pitying state. He stopped by the water to deliberate about his future. He conjured up his history of failed plans. His wife’s family had made known their dislike for him. They thought he was impractical, a joker. This last debacle would surely bring a new round of recriminations. Some of the family elders had even invested in his venture.

Bucky decided that the only way out was to end his life. He would simply swim until he could no longer see the land behind him. He would disappear. His insurance money would improve the lives of his family. They would be better off without him.

He made up his mind to go through with his plan and right when he was about to act, something happened that would profoundly shape the remainder of his years. All at once, Bucky felt himself rising off the ground and floating in what he called a “sparkling sphere of light.” He looked around, and it seemed to him that time as he knew it had come to a complete halt. The earth was standing utterly still. All was quiet. Then a voice, confident and soft, began speaking to him. It seemed to come out of the air itself and find its way to his ear. This voice told him that he did not have the right to kill himself. He could not cease to live yet. This was because he was important to the universe. He would, in fact, be hurting others if he followed through with this grave action. “You think the truth,” the voice told him. “Now go proclaim the truth.”

Bucky was not told precisely what his role was that day, but at the very least, he knew that he had one. That simple knowledge was enough to change Fuller’s course forever. He could now move forward into uncertainty with at least one small light to guide him.

Nana’s story was not quite as harrowing. She had not mentioned a desire to eliminate herself, as far as I knew. But I wondered if her experience that afternoon had been similarly preceded by a very real dispirit of Bucky’s kind. What exactly had she been thinking and feeling since the hospital? How serious was her anger and humility? I continued to tumble around in my bed.

I was finally able to drift to sleep by the early morning. But even in a dream state, my mind was filled with the most puzzling images. I watched, for instance, as Jared lay on the floor of his bedroom, trying to keep his beating heart from leaping out of his chest. His face was obscured by his hair, and I could only see his small struggling body, a human heart bouncing like a baby rabbit. In another dream, Janice Whitcomb sat across from me in a room, watching intently my every movement. It seemed like there was something she wanted to tell me, but I didn’t know what it was.

Then there was the single image I could not shake loose. The most surprising one of all. It kept creeping back into my mind’s eye, in spite of my anguished attempts to suppress it. Strangely enough, the picture was one of Meredith Whitcomb. More accurately, the image was one of Meredith Whitcomb snacking on a pickle, just the way she had been in her kitchen.

In all my early reading about Fuller, there were most definitely sections about women. But I did not come to realize this until my fourteenth year. This is because portions of his biographies were entirely redacted, crossed out by Nana with a thin black Magic Marker and one of her T squares for drafting. Thus, there were many times over the years when I came upon a paragraph that was stricken from the record. No identifiable words. Not even a participle. Most of these sections seemed to occur in his young adult years.

His childhood was blackout-free, right up to the teens. Then, at some point near the end of his prep schooling, I always reached a dead end, and my eyes were forced to skate over the black ice of redaction. The sentences were perfectly blocked out. Like so: As you can see, thick flawless lines of black. No stray dots above the
i
’s. No hovering umlauts. Nothing.

It wasn’t until I was fourteen that I realized I could read the text under this marker just by holding the pages up to the brightest midday sunlight. Up to this point, I had suspected that Nana was simply removing the out-of-date information from the books. That assumption disappeared when the first rays of sun permeated her editorial smoke screen. The first sentence I read was the one above. It read: “Always searching for a party and a good time, Fuller also spent a great deal of his time in brothels.”

I had to spend a large amount of time with a dictionary before I was able to grasp the significance of this detail. And when I understood it, on a surface level, it shed considerable light on other chapters that had also felt the wrath of Nana’s darkening pen. On top of whole paragraphs, there were also images completely encased in a wall of black ink. Now imagine, if you can, the depth of alarm when I held the pages of an anatomy textbook up on a sunny afternoon and saw this:

It took me days to recover.

But the fact is that I was already in possession of some facts about puberty and human development. I knew, for example, that the larynx enlarged during puberty and the voice got deeper. I knew that the shoulders broadened. I knew that hair sprouted in the under-arms, and that the sebaceous glands produced sebum, which could cause acne. Finally, I was familiar with the fact that girls were likely to become especially stimulating to boys at this age.