The House of Tomorrow

Table of Contents

 

 

 

AMY EINHORN BOOKS

Published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

 

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Copyright © 2010 by Peter Bognanni

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada

 

 

The illustration on page 86 is by Meighan Cavanaugh.

 

 

“Amy Einhorn Books” and the “ae” logo are registered trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Bognanni, Peter.

The house of tomorrow / Peter Bognanni.

p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-18452-3

1. Young men—Fiction. 2. Grandmothers—Fiction. 3. Fuller, R. Buckminster (Richard Buckminster). 1895-1983—Influence—Fiction. 4. Social isolation—Fiction. 5. Maturation (Psychology)—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3602.O428H

813’.6—dc22

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

—R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER

—THE RAMONES

EVERY SINGLE HUMAN BEING IS PART OF A GRAND universal plan. That’s what my Nana always says. We’re not alive just to lounge around and contemplate our umbilicus. We’re metaphysical beings! Open us up, and there’s more rattling around in there than just brain sacs and fatty tissue. We are full of imperceptible essences. Invisible spectrums. Patterns. Ideas. We’re containers of awesome phenomena! Which is why it’s important to live right. You have to be attuned to what’s around you, and you have to keep from clogging your receptors with crap. According to my Nana, the universe is sending signals every day, and it’s up to us whether or not we want to listen. We can either perk up our ears, or walk around like dead piles of dermis. I always preferred the former. Which is why I found myself up on top of the roof of our dome on that fall Sunday when everything began.

I couldn’t tell you for certain that I’d ever heard messages from space up there, but at the very least I had a tremendous view. Hanging in the brisk October air, Anver heavy-duty suction cups on my hands, and a no-slip rubber guard harness around my chest, I could see the entire town of North Branch arranged with the uniformity of an architectural model. It stretched below me like a wide lake of split-level dwellings, flowing over the small hills and dips in the eastern Iowa landscape. And above the horizon was the endless ice-blue troposphere, nearly unobstructed save for the waving branches of our black walnut trees.

It was this towering group of trees that gave me my official reason for ascending to the top of the dome that Sunday. Every autumn they bombarded our translucent roof with pungent green-shelled nuts the size of tennis balls, and it was my job to climb the walls like a salamander and scrub away the stains. For this purpose, I kept a large squeegee strapped to my back along with a small bucket of orange-scented cleaning solution. And once attached to the glass, I scrubbed each insulated panel, and kept an eye on my Nana inside at the same time. Right beneath me, through a soapy triangle of glass, I could see her on her NordicTrack, grinding away.
Click-Clackita Click-Clackita Click-Clackita
. The sound was like a distant Zephyr train.

Just the day before, she had told me that most human beings only saw a hundred-thousandth of the world in their lifetime. Maybe a ten-thousandth if they traveled a lot. Only she called the world “Spaceship Earth,” because that’s what Buckminster Fuller called it, and she thought he was humanity’s last real genius. Either way, I was sure I could see my entire portion from this spot. Up on top of the dome, my view was quite possibly someone’s whole lifetime.

“Sebastian!” Nana called from below, her voice echoing off the glass. “Are you watching for visitors up there?”

She stood outside now, squinting up at me.

“Affirmative!” I yelled. “No sightings at present.”

Nana called the weekend tourists to our home “visitors,” as if they were alighting on our lawn from other galaxies in blinking mother ships. In reality, most of them made the trip in large automobiles, and it was my job to spot them from my perch. It was early yet for visitors, though. Every Saturday and Sunday we opened our home to the public at nine o’clock sharp, but it was usually ten or ten-thirty before anyone arrived. According to Nana, people in the Midwest had to finish with church before they could seek any leisure. They had to exalt and repent, and perhaps attend potlucks.

We had begun giving tours a few years back because our home was the first Geodesic Dome ever constructed in Iowa, and there seemed to be some interest in that fact. In truth, we were only a moderate-to-marginal tourist attraction, but most years we made enough to supplement Nana’s modest pension, which is all we needed. No matter how much we brought in, though, I was supposed to behave as if we were overrun with business. Negative thinking sent out the wrong kind of messages to the higher powers, Nana said. Each negative thought was like a hemorrhoid to the controlling forces of the universe. It burned them endlessly.

“Make sure to get the northwest side, Sebastian!” Nana shouted now. “I spotted some bird waste over there. Then come down for breakfast. I need to speak with you.”

“Will do,” I said.

I took a deep inhalation of chill air and began pressing and releasing my suction cups, moving over the apex of the dome to tend to the bird stains. At the age of sixteen, I was already the same height my father had been when he passed away, and my lanky frame covered a surprising amount of space on the dome. When I adjusted myself perfectly on the top, every major landmark in town was visible with the naked eye.

If I looked to the east, for example, I could see the slanted water tower that read “North Branch Beavers” in rust-colored lettering. Farther north was the symmetrical row of small businesses in the town square. Then past the businesses, a little to the west, was the giant brick castle of James K. Polk High School, which I was not allowed to attend because Nana said their worldview was myopic and wrong. And finally, to the far west, I could see all four lanes of the expressway, including the exact exit that the tourists took to visit us. I couldn’t see our garish billboards, but I knew they were there, facing the road, imploring every motorist to visit “The House of Tomorrow.”

I scraped my squeegee slowly over the last of the stains, and then pressed and released all the way down to the brittle grass of our lawn. I had seen on the World Wide Web once that a man from France climbed the Empire State Building with just his hands and feet. No cups. No harness. He was arrested, but he claimed it was worth it to know he was really alive. It was a secret goal of mine to one day scale our dome in this fashion, but for now I played it safe. My sneakers touched the ground with a satisfying crunch, and I undid my harness and let it drop to the ground. I walked around to the front yard and turned the knob on our clear front door.