Doctor Benjamin Franklin's Dream America

by Damien Lincoln Ober

  Thornton has traveled two full days on back country roads to see his oldest daughter. Thirty miles straight shot south, then a hard ninety degrees toward the east, just like this river they’re walking along. Hugged the banks until there was no river left. All the way to Newburyport, Massachusetts, where the Merrimack ends and the Atlantic Ocean begins. On the other side, a war rages for control of Europe. Only time until it rears its head on this continent. Thornton can feel this northeast port already gripped in its tentacles. People dropping out of the Dream to make sure the buzzing isn’t real. Refreshing their screens like eye blinks, they await the next change in reality.

  Thornton’s daughter slips her left arm under her dad’s right, takes some of the old man’s weight. An act he resents but can’t resist. He does need the help after all. “Thomas Jefferson will go down as the worst President in the history of the United States of America,” she informs him. “I think your next post should be about the surety of Thomas Jefferson going down in history as the worst President who ever lived.”

  Thornton lets a tired breath pop his lips. Having trouble this last year getting the energy up for any more posts. Strings of them already mobile down from his existence, dangling and turning through two layers of Internet. Posts and tweets and podcasts and pokes and tickles even, about the state of the country and its politics. If he could have been a little more polemical, maybe born a few decades later, Thornton would have become one of the great voices of the Dream, a screamer of legend status. But instead he’ll be one of the forgotten moderates. A moderate thinker. Moderation hasn’t been sexy since the old Cloud was new.

  “There’s nothing metaphorical about Thomas Jefferson,” his daughter repeats.

  Thornton sighs at it. Neither she nor that husband have too much to rub together as far as brain cells go. Thornton supposes it makes them a pretty good couple. Son‐in‐Law, he calls the guy. Annoys Thornton the way he even stands there, leaning into his words as if every syllable is of eminent importance. “Thomas Jefferson,” Son‐in‐Law begins, “is a poltroon. He is a devil, sir.”

  Thornton rolls his eyes. “A devil?”

  “He is a coward, a rascal. He is a debaser of the good name of the state of Virginia. An infidel. A slapdasher. A rounder. A cheat. A swindler. A backstabber. Mr. Jefferson believes that this curse we hear about is religion! He is a burner of the Bible, and of the Constitution too. He is a master of the dark arts of animal sacrifice, a seducer of married women, and as such, an adulterer, sir. He is a frequent visitor to certain lewd places in the Dream. A mutilator of genitalia. As interested and ambitious for fame as any man who ever set foot on God’s Earth. Mr. Jefferson is an inseminator of the black slave race, a fancy‐headed philosopher of the Dream, not fit for responsibility or respect here in the real. A democrat, sir. A true radical. A Bonaparte, a Robespierre. He has brought the infidel Tom Paine across the ocean to serve as his most trusted aide. And so it won’t be long before what happened in France is happening right here. Thomas Jefferson will destroy the real America and, as his final stroke, erase its very memory from history.” Son‐in‐Law looks into the distance, as if seeing Thomas Jefferson manifesting in the river mouth, the heat of his pure evil bubbling the water into vapors that swirl and swim and make the face of Satan in the air above him. “Atheist, democrat, jyack‐oh‐bin, populist, Socialist, Fascist, Communist, all wrapped into one.”

  When did I start breathing so hard? Thornton thinks. He has to stop to lean on the railing. “All this walking,” he says. They help him down to a bench. Thornton thinks it’s about fifty‐fifty he’ll ever get up again. Not wanting to let on, he smiles and thanks Son‐in‐Law, watches the calming effect this has on his daughter. She rolls away, leans those bare forearms on the railing to gaze out at the bustling port.

  Thornton is reaching into the folds of his jacket, as a reflex, unaware he’s even doing it. Suddenly, he’s emerged from his pocket a twice‐folded piece of paper. “What is that?” his daughter asks.

  “Oh,” Thornton regards the paper, measuring its reality. It’s become a sort of nervous tick since it arrived in his life two years ago. Drawing it out in moments of mind wander to gaze into the puzzle of its words. “This is a letter from Thomas Jefferson.”

  “Is it on… paper?”

  “How did you get it?”

  “He sent it to me. Paid a man to have it delivered.”

  “You mean brought to the house?”

  Son‐in‐Law scoffs, “Not very future‐seeing for the Emperor of the Dream?

  Thornton breathes shallow a few breaths. “He sent one to every Signer, the ones living, anyway. More than half of us are gone now, you know. And I’ll be joining them soon.” You can see the truth of it, and not just in his slack skin, not just in the way he moves. His actions, too. His plans. His mood. He is a man winding things down. This trip southward is for the express purpose of seeing his daughter one last time.

  “Well,” Son‐in‐Law wants to know, all dripping with suspicion, “what does it say, the emperor’s letter?”

  Thornton rolls back one flap and looks at the words written there, in ink and everything. “It’s not what he says that I am interested in. It’s what he means by what he says. And what he wants by meaning it. And what he wants you to think he means by saying it.” And Thornton reads to them a single segmented sentence, leaves even these true‐disbelievers swimming through Mr. Jefferson’s clauses. “I don’t know how much of this music of his is political veneer, messaging, bluster, or just plain old naiveté. But still.”

  In the silence that follows, his daughter sweeps her whole self sideways to hang her uppermost pieces over the wooden rail. Damn, Thornton thinks, it is her mother.

  Son‐in‐Law sinks into the bench’s other seat, regards his wife a beat. Satisfied that she has disengaged, Son‐in‐Law checks his smartpalm for the time, showing off some of that Virginia political theater that must be in the water down there. He leans close, voice just above a whisper, “Two years, three months and twenty days. This is no longer John Adams’ stagnant population.”

  Thornton looks long at him. With his daughter’s attention drawn off, the kid has transformed into the picture of a sly political wiggler. It’s something about these Southern men, how they hide their intellectual contests from their women. This reveal of a deeper Son‐in‐Law should please Thornton, but the sexism of it—and in terms of his own flesh and blood too—just makes him hate the guy in a different but equal way.

  Son‐in‐Law leans back now, like he’s back in a Chesapeake courtroom, about to sum up a closing statement he’s been hammering some country lawyer with for the last five hours. “The Spanish choke the port of New Orleans. World war is raging in Europe. Even if Jefferson did care about the real, he’s too weak a man to do much about it. His clones in Congress have repealed the Judiciary Act, want to replace the court with a group avatar that just checkmarks all Jefferson’s zany ideas. Half the navy rots on the beach because God forbid the plantation lords cut into their tobacco profits for a nickel’s worth of national defense.”

  Thornton presses down on Son‐in‐Law’s knee, the most fatherly thing he’s ever done for the guy. “The population ticks upward for a few months and you watch, Jefferson will be riding high.” Thornton ponders it. “It’s not a life you judge a President by, but the day or the week or the instant you look at him.” He stops to measure the shape his daughter’s body makes as the boats sway and juxtapose their masts to her thin form. “There are other reasons, real reasons, to be worried about Thomas Jefferson. The man‐made Dream has moved ahead of the God‐made Earth as the preferred residence of the human soul. And what of these drones and AIs? Do they know that they are not our peers, that we are their creators? Like some Greek epic, our users and programmers walk among them like demigods. What happens when a species can interact with its makers, compete with them, fight to remake the line that separates the realms?”

  Son‐in‐Law is gesturing to the letter, sti
ll pressed between Thornton’s thumb and forefinger. “Have you heard what the other letters contain?”

  Thornton comes back. I was almost gone, he thinks. “Speculation only. Summaries. But nothing concrete. Not one has been scanned or transcribed. It seems each of the letters is substantially different from the others, but no one will allow anyone else to see theirs, so no one knows for sure.”

  “Well, what does yours say, besides that little poetic, womanish bit?”

  Thornton draws the letter away from Son‐in‐Law’s leaning gaze, folds and vanishes it back into his coat’s inner lining. “What I’d like to know,” Thornton says, “is why the man who’s built his power in the Dream sends papers with hand‐drawn scribbles on them?”

  Son‐in‐Law looks horizon‐ward. “There’s an election coming,” he says. “To decide the President of the Dream. Maybe Mr. Jefferson is trying to unite the Signers behind one of the candidates. If a pro‐Jefferson avatar wins, the Dream and the real will be united. Jefferson will be in control of both.”

  Matthew Thornton is eighty‐nine years old. Which means he’s been older than seventy for nineteen years. He’s been over forty for a majority of his life. And never before this moment has he thought of himself as old. Son‐in‐Law just shoots right past him. Thornton can feel it, the world letting him be free of it. “Right now,” Son‐in‐Law says, “only human profiles can vote, but there’s already talk of group avatars voting in the next one. Then drones and AIs, I’m sure. And then, like you said, how long before their votes are counted out here in the real?”

  I said that, Thornton thinks. He turns away from the closest things to him, intends it to be only a glance, but then the old Merri‐mack has caught his last attentions with its song. “This same water passed by my farm sometime last evening,” he says. “And here it is, dumping into the ocean. A pailful could feed one of my plants for a week. But now it mingles and co‐mingles to meaningless in the vastness of it. Free will,” he says. “Free will is what worries me about Thomas Jefferson. What does he intend and what does he think is inevitable? What would he like versus what does he believe should be without question? Is he really setting America free to find its course, or is he simply involved in another of his art projects, crafting and shaping toward some utopian design he’s gleaned from all his endless forays into the Dream?” Thornton leaves them then. One last opine before separating from the real, passes through a few seconds of his private dreams and then heads off, part of what now?

  Samuel Adams :: October 2nd 1803

  Sam Adams is young again. Catching a hot shave at one of the local barbershops when every smartphone in the place starts blowing up. “Sam, it’s Paul. They’ve sent a brigade into Lexington. Get out!”

  Have to face the day half‐shaved, he reckons. Runs a towel over his chin and it’s out the door. Citizens pointing through back rooms to rattle Sam Adams down alleyways like gravity’s pulling him. Charges through the boarding house door to find the other three all there in the common room. “Mr. Adams!”

  “Mr. Adams!”

  “Mr. Hancock!”

  “Mis‐tah Gerry!”

  Hands pumping other hands. Each forearm decorated with that same Sons of Liberty tattoo, snake sliced in bits, JOIN OR DIE! Here we have them, the indispensable men of Massachusetts, all looking into smartphones. Their eyes twitter now to posts tweeting in from all corners of the colonies. “They say that the British will hang us,” John Adams tells them, winking cousin‐ward, “well, you and Mr. Hancock.”

  Gerry clears his throat. “I’m getting wiggly in my trousers listening to you two saluting the size of your rebellions.” He pushes himself off the wall where he’s been leaning all vacant‐like, tall skeleton of a man. “But we got to be in Philly, like lickedy split.”

  Riding hard down a country road with the battle of Lexington burning the horizon behind them; flying V of Redcoats bursting from the tree line to give them chase—Sam Adams isn’t sure if he’s hallucinating these things or simply describing them out loud to himself. Part of him knows he’s really back in that bed in Boston, but there’s a small sliver that’s not so sure or doesn’t want to be. Doctors have told him the condition is hereditary, a kind of activity‐induced Alzheimer’s where too much motion triggers a slip from the timeline of his life, sends him reeling back through memories as if the memories are the present happening. It started during the Revolution as just a mild hand tremor. Remained like that for years, worsening only slightly. Over the last year, the shaking has shaken its way right up his arms, into his shoulders, down his legs. Sometimes Sam Adams swears he can feel his very brain jittering inside his skull.

  “If I stand still,” he describes it, “I’m fine. I’m here, right in this place and time. But if a good percentage of my muscles get moving,” and he turns a few steps into a walk across the room, then a trot, then a leap, out the window and up the fire escape as the others emerge from other rooms and begin up other fire escapes.

  “Mr. Adams!”

  “Mr. Adams!”

  “Mr. Hancock!”

  “Mis‐tah Gerry!”

  “Seems like old George Three’s making a try for us before we get out of Providence.”

  They scramble onto the building top, then gather to peer over the edge. Below, some daughters of the Revolution are strolling out the front door with the boys’ smartphones hidden deep in the folds of their undergarments. Don’t get but a few steps off the front porch before some Redcoats come corralling.

  “Must be scanning for our signals,” Hancock says. Gerry clicks, “Only time I’ve actually wanted to be British. Those ladies would be a pleasure to frisk.”

  “It’ll take a while, too, all those corsets and strings.”

  “To the Revolution,” Gerry says.

  Sam finds himself still again, in his little den, back in Boston, wasting away in bed, just as exhausted as if he really was still on that escape, high‐speed squiggle through a series of royal governors’ fingers. Slashing south against the grain of the Revolution. Where am I, he thinks, where am I really? Are these episodes my life flashing before my eyes? Or is this room here a leap forward? To help my young self better understand something vital to his existence. I’ll wake up any second and be young again for real.

  He looks to his bedside and sees his cousin sitting there. Not the young version, but the current one. Ex‐President John Adams.

  “Where were you just then, Sam?”

  “Hancock was here,” Sam Adams says.

  “Yes,” the ex‐President sighs. “This election in the Dream is bringing them out of the circuit boards. Now don’t move, Sam. You’ve had quite a fit.” He tucks the blankets in around him. “A lot of people are pretending to speak for other people in the Dream these days. Not just Hancock and Hopkinson anymore. Patrick Henry, Ben Franklin, James Otis.”

  “There’s a James Otis group avatar?”

  John Adams smiles at the thought. “It would be a better Dream if there were.”

  Sam slowly moves to cover his cousin’s hand with his own. “Has the election in the Dream happened yet? Has Jefferson been… repudiated? Is the country still whole, John?”

  John Adams looks past the bed, past the room that holds it, at the country that’s already told him it wants a different way than his. “Don’t worry about the election in the Dream,” he says.

  “John.”

  “What is it, Sam?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I voted against you.”

  John Adams looks at his cousin. “You did more than vote against me.”

  Yeah, Sam says. I m sorry.

  “Look, Sam, you’ll always be my cousin. And you’ll always be the Lion. The Lion of the Rebellion.” John’s face gets younger, loses all those years. New Jersey sunlight suddenly asplash over his skin. They’re kicking their horses the long way around Trenton. Sam becomes aware of multiple times at once. What this city is, and what it will become.

  Ahead, Hancock and Gerry are talkin
g filthy about some Delaware girls they may run into tonight. “Where’s Arty Paine?” Sam asks. “I’ve forgotten Arty Paine.”

  “He’s right there,” John tells him, hooking a thumb. And there he is, all of a sudden materialized and bringing up the rear, Robert Treat Paine.

  “We’re off to the Second Congress, huh?”

  “You alright, Sam?”

  “You know what will happen there?”

  John scoffs. “Nothing if we can’t get the South moving. No hope, I fear, for New York. Not at this point.”

  “No, I mean there,” Sam says, pointing toward the little city, sitting against the sun all but risen.

  “Trenton?”

  Sam watches smoke fingers rising from the tops of the trees. Laces the belly of the New Jersey sky. Distant, subtle thumps of cannon fire. Shouting reaching them like bird calls. When he wakes again, John has left. His cousin either slipped out while Sam was sleeping or was maybe imagined in both times. Sam takes stock of the ceiling a moment, then decides. In one quick motion, he swings his legs out of bed. One step is all it takes for the tremors to take him, piece and whole, hurtling backward in his mind, or in time, or in the fabric of the Dream, to live forever in his greatest days.

  Francis Lewis :: December 30th 1803

  Do you smell that smell?” He pauses, sniffs long for dramatic effect. “Is that the smell of human feces? Is that shit I smell?” A long pause, the idea of more investigative sniffing. “The whole cloud is going to smell this one. That’s how bad it is. Sniff, sniff, sniff. But from where comes such a terrible odor? Sniff, sniff. Why, it comes from Washington, D.C. Something reeks in the house of Jefferson.”

  A sip of water, bony spine curled in over the smartpad, sits there on the desk all alone, the device. A tiny dot marks the spot where the digital microphone weaves in with the touchfibers. A capture light blinks red, red, red as it captures.