The House of Tomorrow Read Free Page B

his headphones.
    “Oh God!” Mrs. Whitcomb yelled. “Is there a phone in this place? Where’s the telephone?”
    I pointed her toward the cordless phone, and she sprinted toward it in her heels. A bit of spit was forming at the corners of Nana’s mouth. Suddenly, I felt a bony hand clap down on my shoulder. I turned around, and it was Jared. He had a grave expression on his face. “Hey,” he said. “Hold her hand.”
    His voice was oddly calm. I didn’t question him. I got down on my knees and grabbed Nana’s palm. It was warm and I held it tightly. I was unable to think at all. I just looked over her anguished face, and massaged the hard nubs of the knuckles. I couldn’t remember the last time I had even seen her resting. She was always up. Always in motion. Jared got down on the floor across from me. He picked up the other hand and pressed it tight. We looked at each other.
    “Sebastian, right?” he said.
    “Yes,” I said.
    “This is fucked,” he said.
    Behind us in the kitchen, Janice Whitcomb was starting to cry into the phone.
    “We just came to tour the bubble!” she yelled. “I don’t know anything about her condition.”
    Meanwhile Jared and I held tight to Nana’s hands, and I thought for a moment that maybe, somehow, we were allowing life energy to course through her spindly frame. Like she was the middle link between our two life-energy links, and if we could just hold on, everything else would be fine. I listened intently for a signal from the universe. But all was quiet.
    “Jared,” I said.
    “Yeah,” he said.
    “You were right.”
    “About what?”
    His enormous fish eyes blinked twice.
    “There’s a sock in that picture.”

2.
    A Metaphysical Connection
    BUCKMINSTER FULLER ONCE SAID THAT THE BIGGEST problem with Spaceship Earth is that it came with no instruction booklet. No directions whatsoever. We have to figure it all out by ourselves and that is some incredibly grueling work. Where do we begin? What methods do we use? How do we know when we’ve arrived at the right answers? I thought about all this while I waited in the dome, looking frequently into the wide eyes of my barely conscious Nana. There was no manual for her, either, I realized. There was no manual for any of this. All I could do was wait and see how the forces would respond.
    They took approximately fourteen minutes to arrive. They came in the form of a blaring ambulance. When it pulled up, I watched as the uniformed men fanned out and then stopped to look up at my home with stupefied expressions on their faces. They were hypnotized by standing so close to something they must have seen often from the highway. But they remembered their duties shortly and gathered in the dome, loading my grandmother onto a neon orange stretcher.
    Nana was motionless for the duration, but her absent gaze remained steadily focused on me. I stayed as close as I could, and gripped her hand as long as possible. Eventually I was forced to let go. The men in jumpsuits gave her short pulls from an oxygen cylinder and rushed her across the lawn and toward the open jaws of the emergency transport. They ushered me inside to a padded bench. The Whitcombs, Janice shouted, would trail in their van.
    I sat unmoving for the first moments of the ride, my palms slick on my denim-covered knees. I could only watch Nana’s sallow face. Her closed eyes. Her slack mouth. But she was respiring. I watched her frail chest rise and fall. She sucked air through the clear mask and pushed it back out. Finally, I reached out and clutched her pointer finger in the grip of my left hand.
    I was too shocked to cry. And I also knew it would not please Nana. Crying is nearly all I had done when I first moved into the dome after my parents’ death. It pained Nana greatly, and she immediately took measures to make it cease. At first I wept all through the night, and wet my new bed too many times to count. Eventually, Nana stayed the night with me to keep me calm. She