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, resourcefuclass="underline" 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.
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.
CULT HEROES
IN NOVEMBER 1995, on the eve of the federal shutdown, the high-school mountain biking champion of California set off down the Central Valley to look for his father. A Fresno Superior Court judge was demanding both parents’ signatures before she would approve Hunter’s emancipation petition. Unless Hunter found Arthur Flynn at a Flagstaff address from years ago, his mother would have to testify at a public hearing. It was a glorious fall day, the hills crisply amber against a mackerel sky. His friend Cody had come along on the promise of a ride. Both boys raced as expert juniors; both were skipping school.