by John McManus
Not that the death had coincided with an upturn in Marissa’s life. Lately she was getting messed up with a taxidermist named Willy. One October night while Willy and Marissa were out joyriding, Carl tried to conjure another of the old dreams to prove that he still loved her. Over and over he crashed cars on dark highways in his mind until he was envisioning his own transfer from juvenile to adult prison, where the guard warned the other inmates, “This one’s a sex offender.”
He woke up gasping. Maybe you could dread just one thing at a time, he thought, walking to the kitchen to find Willy and his mother listening to Led Zeppelin.
“Past your whatchamacallit,” said Marissa.
“Bedtime,” said Willy.
“That’s the ticket. We might go to the beach.”
“Mom, did you ever want to be a scientist?” Carl asked, wondering whom she meant by we, and what beach. The Gulf was hundreds of miles away.
“I wanted to be a nurse.”
“Cleaning up shit and vomit?” Willy said.
“Better than doing nothing all day,” said Marissa, her first statement in a while that made Carl feel like they had something in common.
“Tell me about Bob,” he said, naming his supposed father.
“Bob liked all those guys in the Highwaymen. Waylon and them. Born and raised in Texarkana and he drove an El Camino.”
“Was he smart?”
“Same as anyone.”
“Did he like science?”
“This is date night,” said Willy, shifting Carl’s mood. Frying fish sticks, he imagined again the fusion bombs falling, this time killing Marissa and Willy along with everybody else. He wished Marissa would clean up, climb mountains with him, enjoy the views, but it wasn’t meant to be, and he’d learned to be okay with that; if she wound up in prison, he wouldn’t go blubbering over it like he’d have done last year.
Carl dined in his bedroom with his blueprints laid out around him in a satisfying grid. Peering out at Willy’s trailing headlights, he saw a shooting star, and read up on meteor showers. Already a fellow editor had written about the unusually dazzling outburst of 9 October. Tonight.
The Boyds’ house loomed in shadow as he ventured into the chilly night. He lay down on the picnic table. Right away two meteors came dying across the sky. A boy who hadn’t killed his neighbor might have relaxed into pondering the dynamical evolution of meteoroid streams, but Carl zeroed in on something else, the wishes you made on stars. I wish never to be caught, he decided as another one flared. These burning rocks weren’t the bombs he’d asked for, but chances to remain free. I’m not a violent person, he whispered, as if that too was a wish. Don’t send me to jail.
After a dozen selfish wishes he thought of wishing for Marissa to go clean, but she was under the sky; she could make wishes of her own.
Amid frog croaks like low-pitched roosters he heard his name spoken, and sat upright to face Silas’s mom, Alberta Boyd, standing there in her Target shirt.
“It’s the Draconids,” he said, startled.
“You know, you look a lot like someone on TV.”
Even in the dark Carl could see that Mrs. Boyd, with her sharp cheekbones high on a narrow face, appeared years younger than his haggard mother, yet he knew from Silas that this woman was the older one. “You’ve known me all my life.”
“Not what I mean.”
“My mom’s away at the observatory.”
“Have you made a wish?”
“I don’t believe in that stuff,” he said, coming around to what Mrs. Boyd might mean: she’d seen him on America’s Most Wanted.
“Come talk to me sometime; I know your mom isn’t as available as you’d like,” she said, before walking away again.
More seething than afraid, Carl lay still in the dark. As a shooting star streaked toward a puny hill, he wondered if his father, too, had fallen politely quiet to mask rage. If he’d wished for nations’ ruin merely to calm himself at insults to his mother.
The phone rang inside. It was his brother Frank. “Making a run down to Topeka.”
“Mrs. Boyd was telling me I look like someone.”
“Like me and the rest of us,” Frank said, although they both knew Carl resembled none of the other Bartons. His chin was sharper, his eyes deeper, his voice reedier.
“Kansas is north.”
“I know where Kansas is.”
“You go up to it, not down.”
“Does Mom want her usual?”
“Did Bob have more kids?”
“Weird thing about Bob, he’d had a vasectomy.”
“So it can come undone?” Carl asked, feeling like he was learning that his whole life had been a dream.
“Mom was being evicted, is why I did my first deal. Except she had more cards than I could cover.”
Frank paused. Carl heard clicks of interference. Not just a dream, he thought, but some nightmare, where the terrible truth lurked invisibly around the bend.
“I found this place called Consumer Credit Counseling. Drove back home with the brochure, and Mom told me, I’ve paid my debts. Then nine months later. Anyway, her usual?”
Was Frank punking him? Was he strung out? A vasectomy reversal, the encyclopedia said, cost thousands of dollars. Marissa fretted over sums as small as twenty dollars. Maybe she’d blackmailed a rich guy. Carl went to her bedroom and pulled out a box from under her bed. It held disability applications, credit card statements listing hundred-dollar cash advances, and a crayon drawing of mother and son on a raft in the Ninth Ward, storm clouds swirling above. He tore it down the middle. Burn the box and the house too, he was thinking when he came upon a letter from a man named Jim Smith, at a place in Virginia called JCP, dated 2000.
Congratulations on your acceptance, it read. Peruse the guidelines, sign the confirmation and liability form, and return them before April 1. Upon receipt, our office will contact you about travel. If you have questions, call us at (703) 921-2258.
There were no guidelines, no letterhead, only this page whose number gave a busy-circuits signal when Carl called. He’d been born ten months after 1 April 2000. Pinching his arm, he tried to quell a sense that something demonic had occurred. A thin orange line glowed in the east. Civil twilight, he read, begins when the geometric center of the sun is six degrees below . . .
The phone rang. I’ve solved it, he thought, they’re calling to congratulate me.
“Ms. Barton?” said a woman.
“I’m Mr. Barton,” Carl said.
“Is Marissa Barton your wife?”
“Marissa is my mother.”
“Then give me your dad.”
“I’m searching for my dad.”
“Well, go find him,” said the voice, at which point it became clear this was the police, letting Carl know—as he intuited before he heard another word—that he wouldn’t be asking Marissa about the letter, now that she and Willy and two of their friends had driven off a cliff en route home from date night.
There were so many kinds of bombs. Fission and fusion weapons, split into subcategories that ran to thousands of words each. Delivery systems, trajectory phases, navigational equations; still, some missiles lacked pages of their own. Across the wall from his grieving sisters Carl opened the Article Wizard to channel knowledge from schematic to encyclopedia. Hour by hour the templates grew. Propellant, warhead, blast yield, launch platform. There wasn’t some high heaven where Silas floated over to Marissa to whisper why he’d died; the dead quit knowing you, so he launched a new attack, not some vague bomb batch anymore but Dong Feng 31s and Julang-2s carrying payloads of ninety-kiloton MIRVs. From Jin-class submarines they flew toward America. The impact was cataclysmic. Instantaneously there was no crime scene, no Ozarks, no Bartons, only a lurching sensation like what he’d felt before the car wreck, a cold shiver, an extraneous coincidence, rather than the souls of the newly dead passing through him toward their starting place.
The bungalow Carl’s brother Frank shared with his wife and their you
ng sons sat on a four-lane bypass by a check-cashing store. There was a billboard tower in the front yard, and no internet except at the library in a nearby flat town. Once a week Carl could use his sister Sheila’s computer to look up Jim Smiths who led to various dead ends, but he couldn’t live with his sisters because of their jealous boyfriends. At his new school the top student, Wade Jones, had recently died in a wreck of his own. Since Carl was smart, the other kids pegged him as Wade’s replacement, conflating Wade’s and Marissa’s wrecks the way Carl conflated Wade and Silas. Every mention of Wade returned Carl to a familiar sick place. He began to worry also about the bad education he was receiving. In the work of some of his Wikipedia colleagues, he could perceive the gap between autodidacts and the classically educated. While his mind recalled numbers and diagrams well, and he saw beauty in symmetries both natural and syntactic, he knew next to nothing about the arts. He spoke one language. Rich kids on the coasts were vaulting hopelessly ahead while he lived on some highway. One Friday he sneaked out of school and biked across town to the Montessori academy to tell the director, “I’m Carl Barton. I want to enroll.”
“Your parents should come fill out an application.”
“My mom died, and I don’t have a dad. I live with my brother.”
The man’s tightening smile revealed the essence of what he would say: parental involvement was part of the pedagogy, and it wasn’t cheap; there were no scholarships. Rather than beg abjectly to mop floors, clean toilets, Carl thanked him and left. Riding home, he despised his sisters for attracting bullies, his brother for being a criminal, their mom for raising such a sorry lot. He delivered that anger into his pedal strokes. When he crossed the edge of a plateau into a rare descent, he was already soaring. Then it was like he’d leapt into another biome: sky crisp against a long prairie, exhilaration pumping out of his heart. His T-shirt an airfoil, he stood upright in perfectly dry air. The sky’s crispness, he thought, derives from aridity. When places looked pretty on TV, it was because they weren’t humid. For the first time since Silas had died, Carl felt hopeful. Screw the Ozarks. There were better mountains, and he could go climb them and ride down and his sorrow would be his own fault—that’s what he was thinking when his tire blew and he went tumbling over the guardrail.
For a few months his hard luck multiplied. His blueprints disappeared out of his old house. A time-share developer bought Thistle Mountain and the hills around it. He learned that from his sister-in-law, Denise, as she fed and bathed him. Laid up all day with his broken legs propped up on the coffee table, he found that asking for help made him feel worthless and ashamed. Under his stinking casts his little cousins crawled, singing “London Bridge” while he sketched buildings and requested meals of minimal complexity, prepackaged things he hated the taste of, until one morning his brother and sister-in-law were arrested.
It was a lot like the old dreams: six cops busted in, handcuffed Frank and Denise, read charges of interstate drug trafficking, and carted them off. The social worker who stayed insulted Carl with children’s books and cartoons. Still, he continued to dismiss as magical thinking the notion that he had hurt the Bartons with his warheads, until the boyfriend of his sister Becky, who was preparing to take him in, stabbed Becky in the heart.
His sister Wilma wheeled him to Becky’s funeral, where his sister Sheila arrived with a black eye. “What’s with your eye?” asked Wilma afterward.
“It’s been a tricky week.”
“I’m on probation, so he can’t stay with me.”
“I can’t keep him myself.”
“Have you heard of Jim Smith?” Carl asked his sisters.
“I ain’t good with names,” Wilma said.
“Mom’s files say he admitted her to a program in Virginia.”
“That box went to the landfill.”
“Did she mention Jim Smith to you?”
“Did she talk to any of us about anything ever?” said Sheila, with a tinge of lament that made Carl sorry for her. Imagining the childhood they’d have shared if she’d been younger, he wanted to ask, Do you think we’ve endured an unlikely amount of suffering? She would only have answered that God gives no more than you can take. He kept mum. His hapless sisters seemed apart from him, logic problems to puzzle out rather than humans to love.
They moved Carl into Sheila’s apartment in the gaudy tourist town of Branson, next door to a country music theater where Sheila’s stalker worked at the bar. To take out a restraining order would get Glenn fired, so Sheila didn’t. “While I’m at work, don’t answer the phone or the door,” she said before leaving Carl alone to repair his reputation as an editor.
On her computer he abridged and amended page after page that he’d thought of as his to administer: the St. Francois Mountains; the Boston Mountains; the Salem and Springfield Plateaus. Together these made up the Ozarks, whose stems occupied Carl for days. The Ozark Mountain forest ecoregion; ecoregions in general; biomes; then back in toward the specific, updating citations, testing links. It wasn’t always intellectually valuable work, but it was satisfying, necessary work. Thousands of others were doing it at the same time. To imagine them all gardening their plots of knowledge together, fertilizing soil, plucking out weeds, gave Carl the well-being he used to find outdoors.
“Shouldn’t you go to school?” Sheila asked.
“Mom enrolled me online,” he lied. “The work’s electronic.” It was true he listened to Open Yale Courses while sifting through search results for all three-word combinations in his mother’s letter. Some work took place offline, like when he phoned the sperm banks of Virginia and every company called JCP, saying things like “I need to talk to Jim Smith,” and “This is Marissa Barton, calling about my account.” No one knew a thing. It seemed he would never learn why he stood apart from his relatives. By the time he happened to turn on the Late Show, on the evening of the day when one cast was removed and he graduated to crutches, he was ready to give up.
The guests, said the announcer, included a Marin County boy named Heath Nabors IV, “who, after comparing the DNA of humpback whales, songbirds, and humans, alleges to have isolated genes for musical ability.” That boy strolled onstage and the TV became a mirror. It was Carl’s doppelgänger, with his same oblong jaw, his fair face, his gangly arms, his questioning eyes, his age and stature.
Grinning in a way Carl had never seen himself grin, Heath Nabors IV sat down on a couch. “Your parents must be proud,” the host said.
“I’ve been emancipated from my parents,” Heath explained, with brash pride that sent Carl reeling into self-loathing even as he sat transfixed.
“At the age of eleven?”
“I’m twelve,” Heath said. Carl saw how he must have been sticking his own chest out. Giddy, he heard only little phrases of Heath’s. “Tonal metaphors.” “Acoustic exhaustion.” He imagined such a boastful voice booming out of himself while he kicked Silas, and here was how his lip must twist up in pride before bragging: “My dad made a deal. If I can play every instrument in the orchestra by sixteen, he’ll buy me a Ferrari.”
Heath produced a flute and whistled a display of his technical mastery. Whatever the fourth Heath Nabors had been emancipated from, the third was missing a boy, thought Carl as his sister Sheila entered the room.
“Has anyone knocked?”
“Does Heath Nabors IV ring a bell?”
“This kid? Is he famous?”
“Look at him,” Carl said. His twin was explaining his goal to decode whale speech; Heath doubted that birds had much to say.
“I saw this episode a while back,” Sheila said, as if to prove once and for all that Carl’s smarts derived from his paternal line. “He resembles you a bit.”
She walked away. How could she not see it? Because of studio makeup, Carl thought. Because of schooling: i.e., money. Because of dread, the absence of it in Heath’s face, the presence of it in his own. A widening gap, already manifest. The adult Heath would be handsome like film stars, while Carl would
be a worn and hard Ozark man.
A new kind of dread pooled like mercury under Carl’s skin as he glimpsed a life almost lived, an injustice so common to fairy tales.
He dialed long distance information to ask for Heath Nabors. Soon he was writing down the number for his identical wunderkind’s father. He held his breath and called it. When a woman answered, he asked for Heath the Fourth’s number. She gave it to Carl. He keyed it in. After two rings, he heard a click.
“Yep?” said his own impossible voice, and then Carl could have wept, because it was as if he’d tapped into some plane where Marissa was alive, where she had sought treatment, where she had put Carl in music camp instead of letting him wander to maim and kill.
“I saw you on TV just now and I’m—”
“Another one?” said his ostensible twin, without surprise.
“We’re identical. I can prove it.”
“No shit, moron. A musician recognizes the register of his own voice, even if you do sound like a hick.”
“What did you mean, ‘Another one?’”
“Do you love architecture and have a genius IQ?”
“Why; do you?”
“I asked you, shit-for-brains.”
“Have you been spying on me?”
“I’m sure we have cameras behind our eyes.”
Carl twisted the blinds shut, shuddering to think there could be film of his assault on Silas. “How’d you learn about me?”
“By answering the phone, numbskull. You’re the fourth to contact me. We’re all clones of Thomas Jefferson.”
In six keystrokes Carl had conjured an image of the man whose glinting eyes, high cheeks, and laconic smile could have belonged to an age-progressed image of himself. It seemed preposterous, and he knew that it must be true.
“Father of liberty,” added Heath, in case Carl hadn’t read that part of the encyclopedia.