They wrestle with Colter, who does his best to lash his arms, kick his feet, arch his back, bite. One of the men cries out with a gash to the temple, but they soon overpower Colter, knotting his wrists and ankles.
Then one of the men — breathing heavily — turns to Lewis. His arms appear oversize, thicker and longer than legs. Weeping sores fleck his face. “Your name is Lewis Meriwether?”
“Yes.”
“He’s been waiting for you.”
Aran Burr makes his home in the Flavel mansion, a Queen Anne with a hipped roof and a rounded wraparound porch and an ironwork veranda and a peaked three-story tower that looks down the hill and across a bay studded with fishing and crabbing boats. It is in impeccable condition, even its garden, hedged in by white roses so fat they bend their stems. Several men kneel in the garden, deadheading flowers, ripping out weeds. They have numbers and letters burned brightly along their forearms.
Burr is seated on a patio swing. A wind chime made of wishbones clinks in the breeze. His mouth hangs open as if he has been waiting to speak for a long time. He waves away Lewis’s escort with one hand, knotted with arthritis, and then smiles a yellow-toothed smile and says, “I knew you’d come.”
He wears a long white robe and he has long white hair, just as Lewis dreamed, but he otherwise looks different — terribly different. He is the oldest person Lewis has ever seen, his skin mottled and papery, his joints bent and bulging. His breath sounds like blowing sand. But it is his head that bothers Lewis most. It is twice the size it should be, most of it forehead, with veins worming through it and pulsing visibly beneath his skin. He appears not so much flesh as he does intelligence. “It’s nice here.”
“Is it?”
“I think you’ll like it.”
Despite the frailty of Burr’s appearance, Lewis feels weak before him. He does his best not to show it, steadying the tremble in his voice. “Where is Gawea?”
“She’s fine.”
“I said where is she?”
“She did what she was supposed to do and got what she wanted.”
“What did she want?”
“Never mind that. There are so many other things to discuss.”
“Like why I’m here.”
“Like why you’re here. So many questions. So much to talk about.” A black cane lies across his lap. He takes hold of it now and tocks the porch with its tip. Then he leans forward, rocking the swing and using its momentum to help him into a standing position. “Come.” He leans heavily on the cane when he struggles across the porch and knobs the front door. “I want to show you something.”
Lewis feels drawn to follow as if pulled by a wire. The wood interior gleams, freshly polished. They walk past hand-carved pillars and tiled fireplaces and ceilings busy with plaster medallions and crown molding. There are lamps in every room, with no evident wiring, but they flare when they enter and fade when they leave. The air seems to be humming.
Lewis hears the marbles long before he sees them. Maybe a hundred of them, white and colored and clear, with green and blue and red threads twisting through them, all rolling madly across the wooden floor of the room they enter. They rattle to a stop.
A boy sits in the middle of the floor with his legs folded under him. Maybe five years old. He has a cleft palate and one ear folded over like a shell. Lewis tries to recall everyone he has seen so far, every one of them marred by some deformity. The boy stares at them blankly.
“Go on, Mason.” Burr’s voice is like a rusted instrument blowing out notes. “Keep playing. Show us how you play.”
The boy drops his eyes to the floor and once again the marbles come to life, spinning around him, clacking together. Sometimes they join in streams of color, sometimes in shapes Lewis thinks he might recognize: a bird beatings its wings, a horse galloping through a meadow, a salmon crashing upstream to die.
“Good boy, good boy, good boy.” Burr brings his arthritic hands together in a pantomime of applause. He cannot turn his enormous head, so he turns his body to study Lewis. “You see? Do you understand?”
“He’s like me.”
“He’s like you. Yes, yes. He’s like Gawea. He’s like us.”
“The next.”
“The next people, yes. The next America.”
And then Lewis feels invaded, as if something many limbed has crawled into his head to prod at his brain. He hears Burr’s voice, but a stronger and younger version, the voice from his dreams. “This country has evolved. Through revolutionary wars and civil wars, wars against terrorism, wars for racial and feminist rights. And now, as a result of the last war, the war to end all wars, it has changed again. And we’re changing with it. Fins to limbs, freshwater to air breathing, lobe-finned swimmer to land-dwelling tetrapod. We are the next step.”
Chapter 56
LEWIS AND BURR sit in two leather chairs in a library walled by books. For the past hour, they have been talking, though Lewis is unsure how much of the conversation has been spoken aloud. His head throbs with the words and images runneling through it. He knows about the altar — the Hanford nuclear site — that feeds the river, that nurtures change, genesis.
He knows, too, about Burr’s father. He survived the flu, one of the few immune, but he endured a missile strike on Portland. He was on the Willamette River, out on his boat, his home, the only place he felt safe, anchored far from shore, when half the sky lit up with the trembling white of a gas flame edged blue and red where it battled the night. The concussion arrived seconds later, splitting trees like pencils, melting his skin and crisping his hair and hurling him twenty yards from the deck of his cruiser. He did not know up from down, deep in the swirl of black water, nor did he see what looked like electricity snapping and rippling across the surface — and then suddenly rolling back the way it came — because the blast burned away his vision. His eyes were thereafter sunken hollows, the lids stitched closed. But he could see. He could see things others could not. The radiation changed him, improved him.
“We’re both the products of powerful men,” Burr says. “My father was the beginning. He taught me and now I teach others.”
The mere mention of Lewis’s father makes him flinch. Would he be proud of Lewis, having traveled all this way? Or disgusted at the folly of it, putting his faith in a man he had never met, a man he had not made up his mind about, a man who simultaneously terrified and worried and awed him, a man who in many ways resembled his father.
Their conversation is interrupted by a woman appearing in the doorway. She is primitively dressed in a rough brown dress, which seems at odds with the porcelain cups she carries on a silver tray. This she sets on a short table between the two chairs, and when she does, her sleeve pulls back to reveal the scarred numbers beneath.
“Thank you,” Lewis says, and Burr says, “You don’t need to say thank you.”
The cups steam with black coffee roasted from chicory nuts.
“Why not?”
Burr gives a croaking laugh. “Because she’s a slave.”
The woman bows and leaves them. Lewis sips from his cup and cringes at the bitterness.
Burr holds his with two trembling hands. “Not to your liking?”
“No. It isn’t.” Lewis sets his cup on its tray, giving up on it. “Gawea had those same markings on her.”
“She did.” His enormous head shivers more than nods. “She does. I can tell that this bothers you, but if you look back, way back, on the long hoof-marked trail of human history, slaves are the standard of empire. Rome. Egypt. The Macedonians and Ottomans. The Chinese dynasties. These United States. That’s how you build something big. You have to abuse some to benefit many. In this case, it’s not just about power; it’s about survival. We’re on the brink. This could be the end. The world will keep spinning without us if we don’t stake our claim. I’m the person who is making this happen. You’re capable of helping me. Help me.” His voice grows kind and weary. “Look at me, Lewis. I won’t be around much longer. I need you.”