“Jared,” I whispered.
His left eyelid quivered.
“Jared, I’m leaving in two days.”
I listened to his breath, coming in like a gasp, going out like a sigh. Gaassp. Sighhhh. Gaassp. Sighhhh. I ran my fingers through my hair and came out with a handful of slime. I wiped it on my pants and sighed. “I don’t know what to do,” I said. “I wish I did. But I’ve reached an impasse.”
I got up and left the room, turning off the light on the way out. I needed to wash my hair. That was the only thing I was completely sure of. It was hard to feel properly melancholy when you looked as ludicrous as I did. And when you were confused, the last thing to do was dress up in costume. It was time to find my old clothes, wherever they’d gone. I gripped the banister and dragged my feet down the stairs.
“Very nice,” I heard, the second my foot hit the kitchen tile.
Meredith was drinking a glass of milk. Her schoolbag lay on the floor. Her shoes looked like they’d walked off her feet and died halfway to the fridge.
“All you need now is some eyeliner,” she said.
I tried to make it out of the kitchen without turning around, but I couldn’t. And when I did, I nearly buckled. In all my days at the Whitcomb house, I had never seen her look so pretty. Her hair was up, gathered behind her head in some kind of bun. Her eyes were glistening from the warmth of the kitchen. There was just a smudge of pink lipstick left at the center of her bottom lip. She had a pencil-thin milk mustache.
I wanted to fall at her feet.
“You knew I was leaving,” I managed. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
I must have looked like a fool with my debilitated hairdo. But Meredith didn’t laugh at me. She slowly wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
“Why would I tell you sooner than you needed to know?”
“I don’t need your pity,” I said.
“I didn’t say you did.”
I eyed her. “I see through the act,” I said.
“What act?”
“Your poster-making act. Your dish-washing smiley act. Maybe it’s good I’m leaving.”
She set her milk down on the table with a bang.
“Why would you say that?”
“This hasn’t exactly been the most dignified experience for me.”
Now she looked up at my hair, at my torn shirt. “I see what you mean,” she said.
“I’m getting in the shower,” I said.
“Wait,” she said, “I was just kidding.”
I walked out of the room, but right away I heard her chair slide back on the kitchen floor. My eyes were burning. I stopped at the bathroom door, then went inside and closed it. I took off my shirt and pants. I slipped off a pair of Jared’s boxers and wrapped a towel around my waist.
“Fine,” she said from outside the door. “It might be true, but it’s not because of me. I don’t have to act any certain way for you. I don’t have to be what you expect.”
“Consistency!” I yelled. “Can’t you just ignore me all the time?”
“Maybe I’m a fickle woman. Have you ever thought about that?”
She was right outside the door now. I pushed the shower curtain aside and started the water. It screeched through the pipes and erupted onto the floor of the tub. It was so completely different from the misting shower in the dome. I still couldn’t get over it.
“Maybe I can’t be consistent about anything,” she said. “Don’t take everything so personally. Don’t you know our whole family is completely screwed up? Are you blind or something?”
I held my hand out to test the water and felt it growing warmer. The air directly above the tub was already starting to steam. I took the few steps back to the door and opened it a crack. Meredith was still standing there.
“I don’t think you’re screwed up,” I said. “I like it here.”
“I can’t begin to understand why.”
“I can’t help it,” I said. “And I like you.”
“Another mystery.”
“It shouldn’t be.”
She frowned.
“Why do I always have to say the right thing?” I asked. “I haven’t learned how to do that yet.”
She pushed the door open wider and I took a shocked step backward. She stepped into the bathroom. The room was hot, but the air from the hall was cool. Meredith leaned forward in a blur and pressed her lips to mine. I made an involuntary noise that I can’t really describe, except to say that it was not a flattering one. But her lips held. They were wet and they stayed glued there for the longest three seconds of my life. One. Mississippi. Two. Mississippi . . . She pulled them off with a small smack, and then came back for one more. Her mouth opened and so did mine, and I felt her tongue come in and lazily circle once around my mouth. Her breath had no taste. But it was hotter than the steam from the shower. I saw her pink cheeks and the dark blue makeup over her eyelids. Her eyebrows were blond and thin. She smiled shyly and stepped back into the hall.
“You really live out there in that dome?”
“I did,” I said. “I will again.”
“Are you from another planet, Sebastian?”
“Maybe.”
I pulled the door slowly closed and I could just barely hear her socks on the wood floor as she walked away. I stood next to the pouring shower. Gradually, I found myself regaining feeling in my fingertips. It spread down my arms and through the rest of my body. I threw the curtains aside and jumped inside. And for the next ten minutes or so while I washed the gel out of my hair, and pushed my face into the torrents of hot water, I forgot all about everything else that was happening in my life. I just stood in the water, watching my skin turn pink, thinking about her.
29.
The World’s Forgotten Boys
LATER THAT NIGHT, LYING TEN FEET AWAY FROM A sleeping Jared, I was not so clear-minded. The reality of the deal I had made with Janice was beginning to set in. I had trouble visualizing my return to the dome, even after such a short time away. It was obscured now. One of the original advantages of living in a geodesic dome was the “invisible barrier” it provided between the inside and outside worlds. Of any shelter out there, it allowed the most immediate connection with our environment and firmament. Its creation was even inspired by terrestrial and celestial spheres.
However, I remembered that as Buckminster Fuller’s career had progressed, he’d begun dreaming of grander and grander domes. And his original idea of environmental connection seemed to be replaced by one of control. In 1952, for example, Ford Motor Company hired Bucky to design a ninety-three-foot geodesic dome over its headquarters in Michigan. In 1959, he was commissioned to create a two-hundred-foot dome for a U.S. trade fair in Moscow. The domes kept growing. And flush with the success of his ever-towering space-age creations, Fuller became drunk with his own hubris.
He dreamed someday of encasing all of mid-Manhattan under an enormous “skybreak bubble,” so New Yorkers could live in a virtual year-round garden. Energy costs would plummet. Tinted panels would fight skin cancer. In this way, man’s entire environment would be under complete command. Nana had never spoken much about these later ideas of Bucky’s. Whether this was for personal or professional reasons, I did not know. It was as if after they parted ways, he (and his inventions) had ceased to exist. And I wondered now how she had been able to sustain her devotion after he was gone. What was it that had kept the connection alive?
I noticed after a while that Jared had become restless, his breathing troubled. He rolled over to the edge of his bed and coughed.
“Jared?” I whispered into the darkness. “Are you suffering from insomnia?”
“I’m suffering from your presence,” he returned. “You’re mumbling to yourself.”
“Sorry.”
He rolled toward me, winding himself up in the sheets.
“I’ve been thinking of some things to do onstage,” he said, and cleared his throat. “So far I have crowd diving, playing a solo with my teeth, and spitting on the crowd.”
“I don’t know about that last one,” I said.
“Why? What’s wrong with my sputum?”
I noticed he wasn’t speaking in his usual sarcastic way. There was something gone from his speech, some vibrancy.
“You know the next thing for us to do,” I said, “is produce some tapes. I think you convinced that record store worker that we were a legitimate band. He would probably sell some homemade compact discs in there.”
“I asked for a four-track recorder for Christmas last year,” Jared said. “I didn’t get it.”
“Oh.”
“Maybe my dad will pony up the dough if I write him a weepy letter,” he added. “But I doubt it. He doesn’t really write much anymore.”
I thought again of Janice’s conversation with her husband. If he couldn’t handle Jared’s health insurance, it seemed unlikely that he would buy his son any expensive recording equipment.
“Ooh,” he said, “but maybe I could write the Make-A-Wish Foundation. They’re overdue to throw me a bone. If they send kids to Disneyland they could probably spare a couple hundred bucks for a four-track. I think you have to be a happy person to be considered, though. That might be a hurdle.”
Jared lay quiet for a long time after that. And I thought, after a while, that he might have gone to sleep. It wasn’t necessarily an unwelcome development. But eventually he shifted around in bed again.
“I’m not sure we should play tomorrow,” he said.
I turned over on my side.
“What are you talking about?” I said. “The whole town is covered in our posters.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “But maybe it’s not such a hot idea.”
“What’s wrong? Are you feeling ill?”
“I feel fine, doctor.”
“Okay. Then we just require more practice,” I said. “We can practice right now even, with no amps.”
Jared sighed and then crawled out of bed. I could barely make out his scrawny form as it lurked over to the window. Then I heard the flint of his lighter and saw his puckered mouth in the yellow light. His eyes always looked so small without his glasses. He lit a cigarette and opened the window. The air had grown chillier, and the wind through the screen raised the hairs on my arms.
“Has it ever occurred to you, Sebastian, that I might be a tremendous fucking fraud?” he said.
I watched him blow a mouthful of smoke into the street-lit night.
“No,” I said, “it has not occurred to me. Because you’re not.”
He didn’t appear to be listening to me.
“What I’ve always loved about punk is that you can totally redefine yourself, right?” he said. “You are whatever your songs say you are. Like Iggy Pop. He can wear a white leotard and roll around on broken glass and that’s who he is that night. He’s broken-glass-leotard guy. But it’s all just onstage. Do you know Iggy Pop’s real name?”
“No.”
“It’s James Osterberg,” he said.
“So what?”
“So you can use all of this as a way to blow immense amounts of smoke up your own ass.”
“I don’t understand.”
He wasn’t looking at me now. “My mom’s right about one thing,” he said. “I can’t let my condition define me. She has a point there, for once. But that doesn’t mean I have to pretend to be someone else entirely. I can’t hide behind all of this band stuff forever. It’s such . . . such an obvious load of bullshit sometimes.”
He stopped talking and just looked out the window into the yard. I wanted to hear more of what he had to say, but I didn’t encourage him to go on. Mainly because I understood some of what he was speaking about. It was extremely easy to get lost in the reverie of creating music and making a new image for yourself. It was even easier to forget about all the real problems you faced, the things that actually made up your days. It could, sometimes, feel like a giant lie.
“But no one knows him by that name,” I said.
“Who?”
“James Osterberg.”
“That’s his name, though.”
“It doesn’t matter. Reality is boring,” I said, “and mean. And he defeated it. Is that so wrong?”
“I don’t know,” said Jared.
I was losing him. I could hear it in his voice. And I wasn’t sure I believed my own argument. I threw the covers down to my feet and I got out of my cot. I found my way over to his spot by the window, and I hunched down right by him.
“I saw my sister kiss you today,” he said. “I was walking by. Are you guys doing the nasty now?”
I perked up and immediately looked away from him.
“No,” I said softly. “It was just that one kiss.”
“Relax,” he said. “There’s obviously nothing I can do about it. And I don’t know if I really care anymore. In a couple of weeks, I’ll be gone all day. Who knows what’s going to happen?”
I held my tongue. When I looked down, Jared was holding something out to me. It was his cigarette. I took it from his fingers, careful not to burn myself.
“She treats you like crap,” he said.
“I’m aware of that,” I said.
I brought the cigarette up to my mouth.
“Don’t smoke the filter this time,” he said.
“I won’t.”
I took in a small bit of smoke, and it came right back out of my lungs in a single husky cough. Jared laughed. He patted me on the back too hard. I brought my head down close to the cold screen, trying for a breath of fresh air. Suddenly, I noticed something outside, up on the largest branch. Two objects, knocking together. Meredith’s track shoes. They were back out there, swaying back and forth. For good luck, if she could be believed. And I decided to believe her that night. Because I needed to. In my mind, they were up there for both Jared and me. I didn’t point them out, though, and I wasn’t sure if Jared noticed. He finished his smoke and closed the window without making a sound.
“Don’t listen to me tonight,” he said. “I’m in a mood.”
He extinguished the cigarette in the bottom of a soda can. Then he turned to me one last time. “I just want something real to happen,” he said. “Can you understand that?”