The House of Tomorrow Read Free Page A

said.
    “Is that a fucking sock in there?” asked Jared.
    His voice was grating, high-pitched. Janice and I both turned to look at him.
    “What did you just say?” she asked.
    “I see a sock in that picture,” Jared said. “That’s all I’m saying.”
    “Jared!” said his mother. “What’s the matter with you? Don’t you have any sense of . . .”
    But Janice was not given time to finish her question. Because, at that moment, Nana burst out of the house dressed completely in her pantsuit, waving her arms over her head, as if signaling for a rescue.
    “Welcome, visitors!” she said. “Greetings. Greetings.”
    Nana’s hair was a bit out of place. But she carried two stickers on her fingertips. They were black-and-white, with a cartoon of Buckminster Fuller’s bespectacled head in the center, a wry grin on his face. Nana fastened one on Janice’s wool lapel. She pressed the other one on Jared’s T-shirt, directly on his left nipple.
    “We’ll start inside right away,” said Nana, immediately shepherding us over the lawn. “Welcome to the future.”
    “I already told them,” I said.
    “Oh,” she said, and laughed a little too long.
    “Nana,” I said when she was finished, “maybe you should slow down a little, I . . .”
    She interrupted me with a pinch on the side. Then she gave me a confident grin and tromped ahead of me. We proceeded right into the dome, past the NordicTrack, into the very center of the living room. There was something wrong with Nana’s appearance that I couldn’t put my finger on. As she cleared her throat to begin her speech, I looked down at her arch-supported dress shoes and discovered what it was.
    They were on the wrong feet.
    “In his famous book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth ,” said Nana, looking up, “R. Buckminster Fuller, the greatest mind of our age, states that in order for mankind to progress, ‘We must first discover where we are now; that is, what our present navigational position in the universal scheme of evolution is.’ ”
    She paused a moment and caught me looking down. She glanced at her feet, and then her eyes met mine. It only took a second, but her face changed entirely. Her eyes unfocused. Her teeth found her bottom lip. The Whitcombs were still gazing skyward.
    “And you see,” she continued, a little slower, “when you stand in the very center of a Geodesic Dome, you have the sensation of being propelled right out into the cosmos. Like the universe is sucking you out. This, as Bucky said, is really one of the most intriguing of paradoxes: in order to expand outward, we must go . . . inward.”
    After “inward,” Nana stopped speaking and stared up at the center point of the dome. We all looked up with her. The few clouds that hung above us were small and gauzy. The wind was blowing, whistling over the dome. A few feet in front of us were our kitchen cabinets, hovering over the counter, hung from the ceiling by tension wires. Nana coughed and tried to speak again. And that was when it happened.
    My name was all that came out. Only she ran it all together so it sounded like “Sebas-yan.” Then she took an uneasy step backward.
    “I think I follow what you were saying,” said Janice, still looking up. “Go on . . .”
    I observed Nana’s face closely. It was becoming partly splotched with red. And her mouth was tightening. Just as I noticed this, she reached out a hand to grab me. It seemed to happen in slow motion, but I couldn’t tell what she was attempting. Her fingers didn’t quite make it to my blue flannel. Before anyone could react, she let out a long breath and then tipped straight backward, crumpling to the thin carpet of the dome floor. The dull thump reverberated through the space.
    “Oh!” said Mrs. Whitcomb, looking down immediately. “Oh my God! Are you all right?”
    She bent over Nana. Nana said nothing. She seemed to be holding her breath. I stood completely frozen. Next to me, Jared very slowly removed