by John McManus
“How’d you figure it out?”
“I’m a geneticist.”
“You’re twelve,” he said, even as he read that there’d been calls to exhume Jefferson and test his DNA for paternity of the Hemings children.
“At our age, the original Jefferson spoke Latin, Greek, and French.”
“Who else knows? Your folks?”
“Only the other four.”
“So they’re studying us from somewhere.”
“Didn’t I say so, dipshit?”
Carl was getting tired of being called stupid. Although he hadn’t injured Heath, or done anything in Heath’s presence to be ashamed of, he wished for the Tsar Bomba to detonate over Heath’s house.
“What did your folks do to you?”
“I guess you could say my folks loved me too much. But look, gotta go. Let’s talk tomorrow. There’ll be a Skype conference at noon.”
It was like Heath expected Carl to simply intuit how to find him online. And maybe, by virtue of his genes, Carl should be able to. If Heath was telling the truth, Carl should be able to command, to enslave, to speak with eloquence. Having cross-referenced the Jefferson page, he knew his abilities. He could foment revolutions. An orphan of radical inclinations, he recalled a quote from the man about refreshing liberty’s tree with the blood of patriots. Human blood, Jefferson had said, was liberty’s natural manure.
Carl relaxed into a sense of rightness. “Okay,” he said, “let’s talk then.”
“Well, that’s dumb of you,” said Heath, “since we haven’t even traded handles.”
To avoid notice as identical genius quadruplets, the clones had been using Heath’s blog as a private social network. “Try to catch up” was the last thing Heath said on the phone, and Carl spent an hour doing that, tracing his way through threads about language coaches, soccer camp, vacations abroad. Luc lived in Grosse Pointe, Talbot in Alexandria, Mason in Park Slope. Luc had had extra pages stapled into his passport. It grew tedious to read about the boys’ academic prowess, their overbearing fathers, the careers of their mothers. One mom was an Assistant Secretary of State, the others a producer, a renowned scholar, and a surgeon. Pondering what to tell them about the Bartons, Carl clenched up. It was wrong to feel ashamed of Marissa for being dead; still, however he felt about any subject, his clones stood a good chance of feeling the same. Astronomer, he practiced saying. Researched astrobiology. Lived in Biosphere 2.
He learned that Jefferson had loved botany and agriculture, philosophy and exploration, classical ratios, that his curiosity had been ardent about all subjects but geology. Carl had enjoyed learning about the Ozarks’ billion-year erosion. If I like geology, he thought, I’m an improvement on the original. To read the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom gave him chills. It had gratified his shy, intense, soft-spoken, humble forebear to gaze beyond hills toward the vanishing point, as Carl did now in Branson, thinking, This is who I am. Perplexing though it was for the scientists to have given Carl to the Bartons, he thrilled to anticipate what was in store at noon. We’ll be farmed out to lead revolutions, he thought. No, they’ll put us through Harvard. We’ll be the founders of a Mars colony.
All night Carl read about the American Enlightenment. When the sun rose over Lake Taneycomo, he set his alarm for 11:30 and tried to sleep. Across the wall he could hear his sister quarreling with her boyfriend. The gist was that Sheila was a slutty whore and the boyfriend was done with her. “I love you,” she repeated as Carl imagined his sister alone, wrapping a Christmas present to herself after he abandoned her for his real family. Was he willing? What value to intelligence if it didn’t help his loved ones? Wasn’t it his job to make things better?
No, exhaustion was driving his mind to melodrama. The Bartons hadn’t bothered with Christmas in years.
When at last he slept, he dreamt his mother was a stock car driver with cancer, wired up to the transmission of her Chevrolet SS. She had to drive fast enough for the alkylating agents to be released. Her pedal was to the floor, but it wasn’t enough, and by the time the alarm sounded at 11:30 the cancer had spread to her brain.
He got up and ate cereal, reading the news. A Nobel laureate in economics had passed away. After he updated the man’s page with the date and cause of death, he clicked through the prior awardees, back to Frédéric Passy, French economist and first peace laureate. The man had been born in 1822, when Jefferson was seventy-nine. If Carl made note of the linkage, which existed only in the form of his thoughts, it would be deleted. To change Passy to Pussy, economist to dipshit, would get him exiled as a vandal. As if that mattered, he thought, feeling less and less like himself, until noon, when he clicked in to a video discussion in four little squares that each held his moving face.
“I’m Carl Barton,” he said, gulping down an impulse to run from this horror show of lookalikes with raised cheekbones, yellow-brown curls, and eyes of false beseeching kindness.
“No shit,” said the one with a cello propped up behind him. Heath.
“Say your name again,” said the boy in the lower right.
“Carl Barton,” said Carl.
They all hooted with delight. “Do they have electricity where you live?” drawled one, in mimicry of an accent Carl had never noticed in himself.
“I’m on a computer,” he said, to more laughter.
“Where’d you grow up, on a train?”
“We moved around for my mom’s job,” he said, uneasy. There was no parallel between the other boys’ mockery and the Jeffersonian qualities—politeness, curiosity, decorum—that he’d lain awake reading about.
“Did she drive a truck?”
“She studied the night sky.”
“In the Ozarks?”
“The Ozarks have night sky.”
“What did you score on the SAT?”
“I’m twelve.”
“So am I, but I faked an application to Harvard to see if I’d get in.”
“We have to attend different schools. Luc has dibs on Harvard, I’ve got Princeton, Talbot Yale, Mason Stanford.”
“So no one else knows?” Carl asked, but Heath was talking over him: “Hold your computer up and spin it around.”
“It’s a desktop computer.”
“Point it out your window. Is that the projects?”
“This is Branson. There’s no projects.”
“You know how science works; every experiment needs a control group and a white-trash welfare group. We hypothesized your existence weeks ago.”
Carl had always been different from the people around him, but not because of money. At his school most kids had been poor. He hadn’t felt ashamed. He tried laughing along with the others, and it seemed to work; the teasing bounced back toward Mason. Mason had been caught making his dog suck his cock; now he had to go see a psychiatrist. Talbot guessed they were all genetically inclined to do the same. If so, the clones must have wished for bombs to fall on their cities, too. Heath, Talbot, Mason, Luc, or anyone would have kicked Silas to death.
Carl wanted to confess his apocalyptic fantasies, but the boys had shifted to wondering whether DHS had noticed their similar passport photos.
The debate, neither scientific nor analytical, bounced meaninglessly back and forth. Hadn’t; had; couldn’t have; must have. Even the speculation—“They’ll learn soon”—was perfunctory and incurious.
“Are any of you religious?” asked Carl, trying to think like a scientist.
“Duh, Ozarks, religious wackos don’t do in vitro.”
“If none of us are, it’s a noteworthy finding.”
“Read the blog,” said Luc, a reply Carl heard again every time he tried steering the talk away from matters of insignificance. The inanity of TV plots; the clones’ annoyance at camp humor. Though he agreed, he took no comfort in shared opinions on trivial matters, unless the others were hiding crimes like his and their curiosity was buried alongside their darkest shame. It was important to bide his time. If he said suddenly, “Last year I ki
cked a boy and he died,” he would be labeling them all potential killers. They might clam up, cast him out. So he only said “Me too” in response to shared taste after shared taste: elegant designs, anthemic rock chords, Tuscany. To be poor was to know less. “I loved it there,” he said.
After the call ended and the chat continued by IM, they bragged in foreign languages about their prowess in those languages. Carl used Google Translate to reply. Mason asked about his investment portfolio, and he culled an answer. It wasn’t just fear of being exposed in those lies that unnerved him when they scheduled another dialogue for that night. In some odd way he was beginning to feel proud of his family. No, he was troubled at a deeper level. He didn’t think the scientists could have deliberately ruined the Bartons’ lives, nor did he believe they could have peered into the boys’ future and pegged his as the most doomed. Still, it would have been nice to speak to inquisitive people about these ideas.
It had been too long since his last blueprint. He spent the afternoon drawing a federal center to house four coequal chambers of an imaginary government. When it began to resemble a honeycomb, he considered modeling the power structure on the colonial nests of bees. That didn’t suggest a way forward. The chambers, he decided, would be analogous to the human heart’s. A chamber to give oxygen, a chamber to take it back. A chamber to receive blood, a chamber to return it. White blood cells to fight off contagion, kidneys to remove waste, all controlled by the brain, and the honeycomb he revised into the Great Sphinx, jutting into the ocean on a craggy cape. When the government body was done, he hobbled down Branson’s gaudy main drag toward shapely green hills beyond. Another week and he would be hiking again. Did the others spend time outdoors? They skied and sailed, but if they yearned for wilderness, they hid it.
At the turn for Silver Dollar City, Carl considered visiting that old-timey park, finding out if its log flumes and gold-panning stations would awaken latent genetic memories, but he had no money. While Heath and company reaped the advantages of their geography and wealth, he couldn’t even enter Silver Dollar City.
Was his circumstance a maze to puzzle his way out of, he wondered, sulking onward? Was his bar set lower; must the others graduate summa cum laude from Oxford to match a middle-school dropout’s escape from the Ozarks?
The woman who spoke his name seemed to be hovering suddenly behind Carl’s head. He pivoted with his crutch to see an SUV driven by Silas’s mother, Alberta Boyd.
“Carl, is that really you?” said Mrs. Boyd, pulling onto the shoulder. “What on earth did you do to your leg?”
“I was exploring.”
“Silas is at Randy Travis. I’ll give you a ride!”
Seized by eerie panic, he knew she must have deduced the truth—we all have cameras behind our eyes—but then he recalled that Silas had been a Junior, named for his father.
“Thank you, ma’am. I like to walk.”
“You must live with Sheila. Does she still sing?”
“She waitresses at a theater.”
“That’s nice.” He had never heard his sister sing. In silence he and Mrs. Boyd faced each other. Come talk to me, she’d said, with no idea what she was urging. He’d grown furious because it would have felt so good. Even now, light-headed, holding onto her side-view mirror, he nearly sobbed at the idea of it. Of admitting anything. The bombs, the crack, the other clones, the blueprints, so many secrets, amassing until a dam burst.
“I kicked Silas in the balls,” he said. “He died because of me.”
“That’s sweet of you,” said Mrs. Boyd without even blinking, “but it was his pervert cousin up in Tulsa.”
Over, he almost said. You went over to Tulsa, not up.
“I’m not a pervert, but he asked me to do it and I did.”
“He admired you, Carl. You were a good friend.”
“At first I wouldn’t. I didn’t think I’d like it.”
“It was his cousin Rabbit. He’s in juvie now, up in Tulsa.”
Why wasn’t he glad? Would he feel this way forever? Trust me, he wanted to shout. He didn’t. Again she offered a ride. “Walking clears my head,” he said, refusing again, so Alberta Boyd drove off, leaving him alone with the old dread, fierce as ever, haunting him like a real ghost, and not even Marissa’s; where was her ghost? Hadn’t Carl done something bad to Marissa, too?
There were motels, family fun centers, a wax museum with a parking-lot carnival where he played midway games, tossing darts at balloons until he won a stuffed black bear that wore a toddler-size Branson T-shirt. Gateway to the Ozarks, it read. He wedged the bear in his armpit as a pad for his crutch. Back home, in wait for his pseudo-brothers to come online, he pulled up the Branson page. “Branson is a city in Stone and Taney Counties in the US state of Missouri,” it began.
Placing the cursor after the subject of that sentence, Carl added, “known as the Gateway to the Ozarks,” setting off the new text with commas since it was a nonessential clause.
He clicked through to his hometown’s page: a stub, in danger of deletion. He wrote about cash crops and commerce and linked to similar text in stubs about other Ozark towns. He was hoping to save them. There was still time. He edited mountains nearby, mountains in other states, other countries, even other worlds. With his atlas open to the moon he searched for peaks unnamed, as if he possessed any worthwhile knowledge of them. He gave Mons Moro a page. He gave a page to Mons Gruithuisen Delta. Like his description of Branson, they would be removed for lack of significance, but he denoted elevation and coordinates and name origins until the bell chimed.
“Hey,” he said when the other clones came onscreen, expectant, peaceful, mischievous, resourceful: four kinds of happiness to contrast his empty dread.
“Hey, you still sound like a hick,” Heath said.
“You’re still a fuckwad,” Carl said, and the others laughed in good spirits, seeming glad he’d joined in.
“I was reading about dialect discrimination. Apparently, it’s bigoted to make fun of hillbillies and hicks.”
They chuckled as if they knew what was coming. Even in his unease, Carl wondered if Heath’s upbringing stifled his innate polite humility, or had history failed to catch that Heath’s was the more natural Jeffersonian mode?
“What’s that say behind you?” asked Luc, of the stuffed bear.
“I won it at the fair.”
“Branson, then something smaller.”
“Gateway to the Ozarks.”
“You’re the gateway to the Ozarks,” said Heath, resurrecting Silas’s last living taunt: “You’re an eroded plateau.” The words echoed off Thistle Mountain and across the months and miles. To take the clones’ laughter to heart was ridiculous. Obviously Carl wasn’t an eroded plateau. By the joke’s mechanics, whatever he uttered was rendered absurd. Was it so absurd, though, to call a reborn Enlightenment naturalist who climbed hills and studied maps—who turned the local range’s name over in mind until it struck him as some ur-language’s first word—the gateway to those mountains?
They were still laughing. He had had enough. Every day he’d been soaking in shame, until he was wishing for the world’s end. Not just over Silas. His mother; his sisters; strangers’ pity at those wretched funerals. His petty edits to the encyclopedia—garnish, not knowledge—and on a mountain, when someone had asked did he want to undress in the hot wind, he’d said, “No.” If the geneticists were rooting for the underdog, they’d tensed up while he talked to Mrs. Boyd, and now they would clench their teeth again to hear Carl say, with no motive beyond catharsis, “I killed a boy last year.”
Immediately he had the clones’ attention. “There was no one else for miles,” he said. “It was a warm summer day, and Silas took off his clothes, because he wanted to play a game.”
Listening, each boy exhibited his own tic—Luc’s slanted smile; Heath’s twitching eyelid—but they were genetic equals, whose reactions must mean the same thing: they were all struggling to admit to wrongs on par with Carl’s crime.
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br /> Of course, he thought. Look who they were copied from! They had the DNA of a man who’d confined his boy slaves to a nailery under threat of the lash. Ones who fought were sold into the Deep South. Children as young as ten, living on a mountain at the edge of wilderness, but in a cage, hammering out ten thousand nails per day. Tranquility was the apotheosis, Jefferson had written. Freedom from worry; freedom from pain. Ataraxia and aponia: the Epicurean ideal. Would you spend your life harping on freedom from worry if you were free?
No, thought Carl, as he described tricking Silas out of kicking back, the terrible hike home, the news, the funeral, the aftermath. “Maybe that’s why I’ve learned no other languages,” he said.
Heath was typing. Another boy murmured. Carl waited for text to appear.
“Sounds like you needed that off your chest,” said Luc.
Or was it Mason, or Talbot? Both were suppressing the same smirk, as if no one else had anything to get off his chest. No words had arrived on Carl’s screen. “Look at the depraved things Jefferson did,” he said—an accusation, like saying, Look at the depraved things you’ve done. Look at the freakish secrets plaguing you! They wouldn’t look. Like their progenitor, they’d been raised too properly to defy the convention against reticence. That much was apparent to Carl now that he’d confessed. Not confessing had been miserable. Physical violence led to emotional violence, as it had done for the founders, so corroded by the guilt of enslaving that they’d dreamt of epochal ruin.
“No, you’re the depraved one,” Heath said. “Except for being genius polymaths, the rest of us are normal.”
“Maybe you’re right. Maybe my mom tainted my DNA when she smoked crack.”
He was beginning to hear the twang in his accent. He muted the speakers, not in spite. He had quit wishing for bombs to obliterate his twins’ cities. Suddenly the illogic of absolving himself by means of more harm seemed as obvious as his origins. Their lives were gaming out a wager whose odds had been set before Carl was born. Clone X to exceed historical Jefferson’s capabilities. Clone Y to prove capable of same as original. Clone Z to fail. If Heath and the rest kept up their tepid investigation, they would decipher a scheme to use settings of disparate privilege to pursue a trite inquiry into nurture and nature. Unplugging his modem, Carl forsook that quest for lack of significance. There were more intriguing questions. His injuries to the Hemings family alone had had Jefferson stoking the Reign of Terror. Whether or not that aligned with the record, Carl’s own thoughts proved it. He had worthwhile knowledge that would rewrite history. His dread was going to change the past. Not long ago, when he was still devoting his considerable brainpower to cluster-bombing, the ones who’d bet against him must have believed they were sitting pretty.