“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 young 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.