The House of Tomorrow (5 page)

Now, under the light snow, our taxi finally arrived in the hospital lot, and Nana presented the man with the twenty. She didn’t say a word.

“Two-forty Hillsboro Drive,” I said.

I sat up front with the driver.

“Where’s that?” he asked.

His wipers squeaked back and forth in front of us. The lot was empty.

“We live in the glass dome,” I said, “just off the highway and up the hill.”

He nodded and turned on the meter.

“I’ve been meaning to take the tour,” he said.

“Closed,” said Nana, just a notch above a whisper.

We both turned around.

“What?” I asked.

“Closed,” she said again.

She looked out the window. Her breath fogged the snow-specked glass beside her.

“Hmm,” said the driver. “Then I guess I missed the boat.”

 

 

 

SPRINKLED WITH A LIGHT DUSTING OF SNOW, THE dome resembled a puff pastry that day. And it appeared smaller than before. We entered and both of us looked around; everything was where it should be. The smell was a familiar one of Windex and Nana’s Lavender Talcum. The light was soft and gray, dimmed from a slight tint to our dome panes. Nana exhaled deeply. Then she trekked directly to her bedroom and closed the door softly behind her. I barely heard from her the rest of the day.

As far as I could tell, she just lay in bed for the first few hours. She spent the evening, however, with her door ajar, examining photographs of architectural work she had done in the 1980s. For years she had been hired by dome manufacturers to invent new variations on the standard kit structure. She pored over her pictures now, even tacking a few to a bulletin board outside her bedroom. One picture showed a place she’d designed in Arizona with enormous triangular skylights, surrounded by hexagonal shingles. Another photo showed a compound on a peak above the Pacific Ocean in California. It was a series of three domes connected by underground walkways. Around eight, I came to ask Nana if she needed anything, and she dismissed me with a detached smile and a brush of her hand.

Upstairs in my room, I sat alone in front of our computer. I had spent the afternoon trafficking Web sites that Nana had previously sanctioned for me. Normally, she sat with me anytime I was on the computer, and then took away the modem every night. But now she was gone, and I could distinctly feel her absence. Earlier, I had been reading Web pages about design science, and I had tried to memorize and take notes.
The ultimate geometry-based creation is the sphere. All spheres are created from a point of singularity at their center. This center silences all waves, and opens the door to the life force.

By dusk, I couldn’t read another word about it. My mind was saturated. But before I got up from the computer I felt myself typing two last words into the Web. I typed them without thinking. I typed them with one finger. And when they appeared, I noticed my pointer finger was quivering.

I had typed “the misfits.”

I pressed enter, and a list of sites popped up. I clicked on the very first. Right away, an image of a long-haired man loaded on the screen. He was glowering at the camera. A giant biceps flexed below his face, and on his arm was a tattoo of a bat creature with a skull head, and a tiger. Under his picture were the words “Punk rock icon.”

I quickly shut down the browser.

But an hour later, I returned to the keyboard again. I typed “punk rock music.” This time, I began to scan the articles. And I found right away that it was another language entirely. There were so many words I didn’t recognize, and I couldn’t distinguish between the band names and the songs. It all came at me in a jumble. Minor Threat. The Buzzcocks. Rudimentary Peni. Forward to Death. Warfare. I Don’t Care About You Fuck Armageddon This is-Hell John Wayne was a Nazi.

Yet I couldn’t look away. After every few lines, I took to nervously shutting off the monitor and moving back to the other side of the room to read trigonometry. Sine. Cosine. Tangent. Sine. Cosine. Tangent. “Note the position of the terminal side. Do these angles have the same terminal side?” But gradually my eyes left the book again, and I made my way back to the screen. I did not sleep until three A.M.

The next day I continued my research in longer stretches. And eventually, bits of ideas started to filter through. It was still hard to make sense of the terms; I had never really listened to music. All I’d heard before were Nana’s classical music albums, and the tape of beluga whale calls she listened to at night to aid her digestion. But I could begin to understand some snippets of what was written about the music. After every sentence, I looked over my shoulder. And each time I fully expected to see Nana there. In all our life together, I had never possessed this much continuous time alone. I felt untethered.

But still, I moved on from articles to songs. All I had to do was click on a title on the Web, and the song would begin playing from the tinny speakers in our monitor. I kept the volume low and pressed my ear to the plastic. I played a few songs over and over, trying to understand them. They didn’t have an immediate effect. This was a new species of sound. Something entirely different. The shrill squawks from the guitars. The fuzzy bass guitar parts, and the caustic singing. It didn’t make sense necessarily, but eventually I found the simple melodies sticking in my brain. The fast rhythms and thundering drums made my pulse jump. I could tell that something was happening.

I took a long walk that second evening, singing the choruses to myself as I passed the rows of white oaks and basswoods.
“Now I wanna sniff some glue! Now I wanna have somethin’ to do!”
I had walked these woods, all the way to the edge of town, since I was a child. If you walked long enough, the brush turned directly into guardrail, and you faced the highway traffic into North Branch. Deafening cars speeding toward home. I walked along the road, in time to the drumbeats, playing the guitars in my head. I yelled into the cars’ whizzing paths.
“All the kids want somethin’ to do!”

I began to feel that music like hot blood in my veins. I jumped up and down. I cupped my hands and shouted into the air. I felt all my synapses firing at once. And on the walk back home, I finally thought of the information Janice had given me. I searched my jeans pocket and found the paper right where I’d stuffed it. I unfolded it and looked down at Jared’s e-mail address. It read:

The writing was Janice’s. Loopy. I had registered an e-mail account myself years ago in order to ask questions of the Buckminster Fuller Institute. I hadn’t made use of it since I was twelve. But that night, I opened it up and typed in my secret password (even Nana didn’t know what it was). I typed: orphan.

And then I composed this short message:

It wasn’t until the next morning that his response came back. I checked the computer every half hour after rising until I saw the reply. It sat among the strange advertisements I had compiled in my idle account: low-cost condominiums and pills for the male anatomy. Then there was Jared’s response. I held my breath and opened it up.

I had just finished reading it for the fourth time when I turned around and saw Nana waiting in the doorway. I sprang up from the chair. It was late morning, and she was still in her burgundy bath-robe. I’d been too engrossed in my reading to notice the sound of her footfalls on the stairs. Now she was there, and her gaze jumped from the screen to me. In the last couple of days her eyes had regained a bit of their luster. They seemed to flash at me now like a cat’s.

“Nana,” I managed. “Is your health improved?”

“Your . . . homework,” she said, and held out a flat palm.

She still sounded the words out slowly, but there was force behind them.

“Oh,” I said. I clicked my tongue. “I didn’t know if I was supposed to complete it without the accompanying lessons.”

She shut her mouth tight and took a couple of steps into the room.

“What have you been . . . accomplishing?” she asked.

I looked at the screen. “Well,” I said, “I’ve been investigating some things on the Web. The Fuller Institute has begun to archive some documents, which is really . . .”

Nana walked across the room and picked up my open math notebook. She began flipping through it, licking her finger each time she turned a page. I knew what was in there; it was not impressive. There were unfinished graphs. Unsolved problems. Triangles with no identified angles. At one point earlier in the day I had written the words “trigonometric identities” over and over again until an entire page was full. I was sure it was when Nana reached this page that she dropped the notebook onto the floor.

“You have used . . . my illness,” she said, “for your own purposes.”

“No,” I said. “I just didn’t know what I was supposed to do.”

It took me a couple of moments to realize why I felt so anxious. My muscles all seemed to tighten at once. I was lying to her. And she knew.

“You don’t need me to tell you!” she said. “You never did. You just complete. You . . .” She stopped for a moment to think through her sentence. She looked around the room again, like she was searching for the word in the air. Her eyes returned to mine.

“By tomorrow,” she muttered, “you finish.”

Her voice was low, and she was breathing heavily. I suddenly became afraid she would collapse again. I walked toward her, but Nana turned around before I could reach her. She stepped out of the room and took the stairs slowly, one at a time.

“You are on a path!” she yelled from the staircase.

IN THE BEGINNING, NANA SPOKE VERY GENERALLY about my path. I wasn’t going to be like other boys, she said. There was the traditional way to live; then there was the dynamic and i ndependent way. My life would resemble the latter. A life of experiment and higher ideals. A life of constant question and risk. This is the way Fuller had lived, so this is the way I would live. In fact, Bucky had once called himself Guinea Pig B, stating plainly that his life was an experiment. He wanted to see what an average man on earth with few resources could accomplish in a single lifetime. When I was just a boy, Nana had sometimes called me Guinea Pig S, and she told me I was a living experiment, too. My life, she said, would serve humanity just like Bucky’s.

It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that she began to get more specific. Until this time, I had never even heard any particulars about her relationship with Fuller. But one night just after my fourteenth birthday, she sat me down at the kitchen table and poured us both a small glass of Canadian ice wine. She told me she had been waiting to tell me some information for a very long time. And that night, she would finally reveal to me what we were working toward in the dome.

She started with a long sip of wine. Nana normally didn’t drink, but she was so fascinated by the Canadian tradition of squeezing water crystals from frozen grapes that she made a few exceptions a year with ice wine. She asked me to join her in a drink. We sipped the sugary wine, and eventually Nana began to speak in a soft and reverent voice.

“We were in my small apartment in Edwardsville,” she started.

I knew, by this time, exactly who she was speaking about.

“It was three-thirty in the morning and he was up preparing for a lecture. I remember waking to the sight of him perspiring and breathing heavily by an open window. He was sucking in full breaths of cool night air. There were big drops of sweat on his brow. The streetlight from the town square was reflecting in his glasses. It almost appeared that his eyes were emitting light.

“I asked him what was wrong. He immediately removed his glasses and grinned his sly Bucky grin. He took a long drink from a glass of water I kept by the bed. Then he told me that in our lifetime there were going to be no more governments and no more corporations.

“ ‘Once all my inventions are available,’ he said, ‘people will see that all these bureaucracies they are living under are no longer necessary. When people can meet their own fundamental needs, when individuals themselves can do it; that will be the judgment day for our rulers. The officials, the leaders, and power mongers will all be out of a job!’

“He told me that once his design science principles were put into effect on a world scale that we could start pouring all humanity’s resources into sustaining life. He talked all night. Everyone on Spaceship Earth was going to be able to survive without poverty, he said. Humanity would evolve. The species would thrive.

“ ‘Eventually,’ he said, ‘the freedom of this revolution will be so intoxicating, humankind will have no choice but to take part. Because that’s what I’m talking about here, Josie, freedom. An absolute personal freedom.’ ”

Nana stopped after that. She took a drink of wine and motioned for me to do the same. “He even imagined domes,” she said, “that could be heated and made to levitate. He called them Cloud Nines. They would one day be joined to make full cities, hovering over the earth. They could migrate according to the weather. People could go anywhere, become true global citizens. If we chose, we could all live aboard these airships with no strings to base earthly phenomena. We could be completely free.”