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 kicked 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.”