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.
“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.