“If I could, I want to start by doing something a little different this evening. So if you’d all follow me, I’d like us to go upstairs to the reading room.”
There was a general hesitation, and then the group rose to its feet like sedated zoo animals. Jared and I were at the front of the room already, so we stood right next to Janice. Meredith brought up the back of the line, still typing away on her phone. We all walked out and headed single file up a narrow staircase. If anyone noticed me as an unfamiliar face, they didn’t say a word. We reached the top and convened in a room full of old books and stacks of programs. At the far end of the room there was a small fire burning in a fireplace. Janice walked through the group and handed us all note cards and pens. Then she stopped and closed her eyes.
“Life is full of distractions,” she began softly. “Problems, too. Some we can’t help. But there are so many distractions these days that we often forget to concentrate on what is really important. And I’m not just talking about your spirituality here, folks. I’m talking about personal growth. Being a better you.”
She opened her eyes. Her voice had sounded different than I’d ever heard it before. It was more even, assured. The group hung on her every word.
“What I want you to do tonight,” she continued, “is to write down something that is holding you back. Something that is keeping you from committing entirely to God and to yourself. We’ll call it an idol. I want you to write down this idol, or draw a picture of it, and then we’re going to cast these idols into the flames. Does everyone understand?”
There were a few nods, but nobody began writing.
“This is how Mom thinks you communicate with God,” said Jared. “You burn stuff and God reads the smoke.”
“No talking please, Jared,” said Janice. “Time for idol drawing.”
Jared sighed and began halfheartedly scribbling on his card. I couldn’t make out what he was drawing, but it looked like the beginning of a family portrait. I stared down at mine. What was keeping me from God? Or from myself? I didn’t think it was a bad question necessarily. It was surprisingly valid. I noticed everyone else was connecting pen to paper. They appeared locked in unbroken concentration. I looked for Meredith, but she was no longer at the back of the room. She was gone. I began to perspire.
Soon, the first few teens began walking up to the fireplace. They smiled at Janice for permission, and when she nodded, they flicked their little folded papers into the shuddering flames. A big kid with a hat that read “Broncos” had constructed a paper airplane, and he dive-bombed it right into the heart of the fire.
“Praise Jesus!” he said, and high-fived Janice.
Everyone laughed. I looked at my empty card again, and then turned to Jared. I needed to ask him a few more questions about this supposed communication process. But he had his eyes closed, and his card was wadded up in his fist.
“This isn’t going to be pretty,” he said. “Just so you know.”
“What isn’t?” I said.
In front of me, the idol burning picked up momentum. A line of girls dropped their papers into the hearth, and then moved on to Janice Whitcomb for a big hug. Jared opened his eyes and adjusted his glasses. Then I watched him put his pointer finger directly down his throat. There was a loud gag, and then a second delay, before a staccatoed burst of vomit shot out of his mouth.
“Aww, God!” shouted Jared, “I’m having a reaction!”
Janice froze mid-hug and her eyes leaped immediately to her son.
“Jared!” she yelled.
Jared faked a terrific fall to his backside, deftly missing the small pools of his own vomit. The crowd backed away and looked down at him with contorted, deeply confused faces. Jared only glanced at me once, but the message was clear enough: it was time for me to go. I stuck my card in my pocket and headed straight toward the exit.
“I’ll collect some towels!” I said, but I don’t think anybody heard me.
They were all huddling around Jared. Janice was already kneeling, stroking his forehead. I managed to duck out in seconds, and found myself in the complete quiet of the stairwell. I took the stairs two at a time. My heart seemed to be beating in my forehead. My palms were slick on the railing. But I made it down without toppling over, and continued toward my destination.
I walked past the empty Recreation Room and back down the dim hallway of classrooms. The eerie portraits of saviors watched me from the walls. “God is a verb,” I said to myself, “not a noun. Not a picture.” I repeated the sentences like a mantra. Godisaverb. Godisaverb. The light from the end of the hall was now just a muted shade of rose. I was so focused on my task that I didn’t detect another human presence in the halls until I had reached the closet. It wasn’t until I had extracted Jared’s key from my pocket that I heard the first muffled moan. I whipped around and squinted into the tenebrous light of the doorway at the hall’s end.
At the far right side of the entry was Meredith Whitcomb in the embrace of a boy. He was pressing himself firmly against her tight-sweatered torso, and one of his hands was actually inside her shirt, cupped over a breast. I started to feel sick to my stomach. I watched raptly while he massaged her body and kissed her thin neck up to her hairline. She made a series of soft whimpers, and the boy laughed and covered her mouth. It was while the boy’s hand was covering her lips that she happened to turn and notice me. Her eyelids flickered a moment as she met my stare. Then she closed them again. When the boy’s hand left her mouth, her lips had formed a tight smirk.
As quietly as I could, I fit the key into the lock and submerged myself in the total darkness of the closet. I stood there huffing the musty air for a minute, attempting to get a full breath. In the pitch black, all I could see was that smirk. Meredith’s eyes closed. Her chin tilted upward in pleasure. I nearly gagged. Finally, I gained the wherewithal to feel for the light switch, and the room exploded in a flash of fluorescence. Along the back wall was a row of old instruments. A nicked-up acoustic guitar. A long keyboard. A set of hand-bells in a felt-lined case. And in the corner, like a neglected child, there was a dark-wood bass guitar. The strings hummed when I picked it up.
It took me a moment to regain the will to leave. But then I thought of Jared, who had just induced vomiting for the sake of our endeavor, and I rushed out of the closet, sprinting down the hallway without looking back at Meredith. I ran away from her doorway, the one I had planned to use, and instead burst through the double doors of the front entrance. Night had arrived, and brought a deeper cold with it. I stuffed the bass under the lip of a hedge and then collapsed down in the grass.
I stuck my hands in my pockets for warmth, catching my breath. And I watched as a nearby streetlight flashed twice and popped on. My hand grasped onto something, and I knew before I took it out that I was holding Janice’s note card. I looked it over. It was just a yellow piece of paper with pink lines separating it, but it seemed like more. It was a vessel for communication with a higher power. It was like an e-mail to the Greater Intellect. I looked down at it. I still had my pen in my pocket and I took it out and wrote a single question. I wrote: “Please, what is my path?” Then I folded it in even fourths and tucked it in my breast pocket, where it hovered over my wildly beating heart.
12.
Transmissions
THAT NIGHT, I RODE HOME WITH A FENDER BASS guitar fastened to my back with a single leather strap. I had no carrying case so the body of the guitar banged against my back as I rode up the hill to the dome. The strings made sounds like the whales on Nana’s tape each time my tire hit a bump. But when I arrived at the bicycle storage shed, the bass was still in one piece. I quickly hid it under a mesh tarp and exchanged it for two cans of Derbyshire Green paint. I had asked the ill-tempered man at the paint store for something “verdant and cheap,” and this is what he had given me. The brand was not on sale, but it was well within Nana’s budget. My business sense, I hoped, would still be celebrated.
It was disquieting to think about all the lies I had told Nana in the past few days. It was new territory, and like anything unexplored, it conjured both fear and excitement. I tried not to let myself dwell on it as I walked through the moon blue woods. The dome was dark this time, and I couldn’t stop myself from speculating about the goings-on at the Whitcombs’, where I was sure the lights were still on.
The van ride home had been one long argument between Jared and Janice about the severity of his episode, and whether or not a visit to the emergency room was necessary. Meredith sat in the very back of the van, utterly quiet. I could sense her back there, watching my head, perhaps noticing the yellowed collar of my only white dress shirt. As of yet, no one had mentioned her absence from the idol burning, and I’m sure she was pleased that Jared’s flop had overshadowed any other problems at the Group that evening.
“It was your meat loaf!” Jared screamed. “How many goddamned times do I have to tell you, I don’t like green peppers in the meat. I can’t digest them. But every time we have meat loaf, there they are! Then I spend the whole night on the toilet.”
“Jared, you know the doctors treat any symptoms as a possible rejection until proven otherwise,” said Janice. “I’m supposed to worry.”
There was still that calm in her voice from the meeting, but it sounded on the verge of disintegrating any minute.
“I knew those peppers had a return ticket, man,” he said. “They were just vacationing in my stomach.”
I finally settled my gaze on the scenery passing by the window. I tried to keep quiet and avoid looking guilty. The neighborhoods of North Branch had always interested me. I was beginning to find some calm when I felt Meredith’s hot breath on my ear.
“Don’t turn around,” she whispered.
Her short exhalation echoed around in the acoustic meatus of my ear. A shiver started in my neck and coursed through my body. I did as she said.
“Jared, it’s been a long time since your last rejection occurrence,” said Janice up front. “Don’t you see where I’m coming from here?”
Jared belched in reply.
“I know what you did,” Meredith breathed. “I know you saw me. But I saw what you did. And I’ll tell if you tell. Is that clear, you perv?”
I nodded slowly. Upon uttering her last word, her lips had almost grazed my ear. I was paralyzed by the warmth of the almost-contact.
“Why does this always happen?” asked Janice to herself.
“Because I’m damaged goods,” said Jared.
“Don’t say that,” she said. “Don’t you ever say that about yourself.”
Promptly, Janice turned her eyes to me in the rearview mirror. She looked like she might break down at any moment. “I’m sorry you had to experience this, Sebastian,” she said. “I was so hoping you’d enjoy yourself and want to come back. Nothing ever turns out right around here.”
Her gaze returned to the road. The passing headlights flashed over her eyes.
“Does Mr. Whitcomb go to church?” I asked.
I’m not sure what impelled me to ask the question. Most likely, I just felt I should say something to cover the silence. But there was a long pause after I spoke. I looked at Jared. His lips were pursed and he violently shook his head.
“Mr. Whitcomb does things his own way,” Janice said. And that was all.
The rest of the van ride was a continuation of this uncomfortable quiet. Jared refused to look at me. Meredith stayed far away from my tingling ear. I waited patiently for it to end, adding up what I now knew about Jared and Meredith’s father. (1) He worked in sales. (2) He did things his own way. (3) I had never seen him.
Later, when I was biking back to the church to recover the bass guitar, my thoughts returned to the neighborhoods of North Branch and their sense of proximity that I found so perplexing. Even though there was ample space for building in the hilly landscape of eastern Iowa, residents chose to construct and live in neat rows of houses, connected by sidewalks like links in a chain.
Yet Bucky had envisioned a world where people could be more autonomous than this. A world where they would elect to live in remote areas and take care of all their own needs. But here was a spacious rural area, and the citizenry had not chosen isolation and privacy. They had chosen community. Nana had always extolled the virtues of Bucky’s plan, which is why we lived in Iowa away from the town proper in our own “autonomous dwelling unit.” To her, it was a more elevated stage of freedom.
But I had always had a sneaking suspicion that our tours were not just administered for financial and educational purposes. Before she had experienced her brain-blood interruptions, I often saw a real delight in Nana’s eyes when people came to visit our home. She was never more spirited and dynamic than when she was leading a tour of nodding visitors. And there were days when she stayed around talking to a curious architect, or a child with a school report, for hours. This was not the behavior of someone with no use for community. Her acts were not those of a loner.
I hiked up the hill toward the dome, looking up at the basswoods that marked the exit from the heart of the woods. They were completely bare now and they contrasted greatly against a sky that looked white with clouds even in the dark. It was probably going to snow. If there was one thing I understood, it was the portent of night weather.
Everything was murky inside the dome, but not quite dark. It was only eight-thirty, yet it seemed Nana was already in bed. I checked on her after setting the paint on the kitchen table. For once, she was just where I expected her to be, curled up in her bedroom, one leg dangling off the bed. I delicately picked up her leg and arranged it next to the other one. It was so lightweight. It had never occurred to me until the stroke just how slight of build Nana was. I was watching her thin chest move up and down, trying to see if her breathing was regular, when she opened her lips and mumbled something like: