Louisa sighs. “These men today, though, Uncle, jealous young Americans. Trying to remake an age that doesn’t need remaking.”
Adams shrugs, nods feebly. “We certainly did unleash a kind of spirit in this world.” The sun comes out then, takes the rectangular window and makes of it a perfect square of light. Lays it on the floor, just missing Adams’s chair. But then it’s gone. Storm clouds now raking in their first edges. Adams eyes the darkening sky. “Maybe this is it. Maybe this is the curse.”
“No one believes in the curse, Uncle. Not anymore.”
Adams smiles, laced with something clandestine. “That’s where you’re wrong. No one ever did.” He holds up a fist that looks more like a tiny throw pillow. “The simple gathering of diverse minds, the natural and wonderful conflicts that result, a potential energy that can fuel a society for years. But not forever. More The Deaths will come, more Off‐Worlders and trade wars. There’ll be another Millipus of some kind. And we’ll beat it. And get stronger and stronger. Again and again. Right up until the last one. The last struggle that finally breaks us and brings us down. And it won’t be because the calamity is too big for America but because America will be too small for the calamity.”
Adams thinks back over this day so far. The Fourth of July. Spent a good chunk of it not here but wiggling through the past instead. He removes the smartlife, lets it rest in his palm. “Take this thing,” he says.
Louisa gets up to make diagonal across the room. “You sure you don’t want to experience some more of the Age of Jefferson?”
“I think once was…”
“What is it, Uncle?”
Adams has taken hold of his head. He screams, forces open his eyes, looking wildly. “Is this happening to everyone? Is this the curse?”
She looks at her hands. “Just you, I think.”
By the time the doctor arrives, the pain has subsided. Adams lies in that same chair, mostly gone still. One look and it’s clear that here is the spot from which this one‐term President is going to leave the Earth.
They patch a feed into John Quincy right away. His face sits in the frame of a soft display. He doesn’t really look like an earlier version of his father, but that’s the idea in the old man’s head. There I am, he thinks, President John Adams.
“We’ve got a clean feed, Dad. Some scramble coding of my own design. Not going to have anyone breaking in and posting any of this to 3net, so don’t you worry.”
The elder Adams looks into the faces around him. Then into the empty spaces between. Wish we had group avatars of all the Adamses, he thinks. So they could all be here. All of them, from all throughout time. And Abigail, too.
“Dad, how do you feel?”
“He’s been talking about the curse,” Louisa informs the room.
John Adams cracks open his droll mouth. “Don’t need no curse. Same for people as it is for countries as it is for clouds as it is for
solar systems and universes, too. Some miracle, some struggle, some coming together, a burst of energy, then the slow burnout.”
“Mr. Adams,” the doctor tells him. “You’ve had a major stoke.”
Adams nods, pats his niece’s arm. Reaches out for John Quincy but only bends fingers on the screen. “Dad.”
His hand hangs there forgotten. Louisa tucks it gently to his side. “He looks sort of cute, doesn’t he, John Quincy?”
The old President lies there with eyes barely open, the little slivers wet and welling water along their edges. Like brain or soul leaking out of him. A small noise. The two present lean in to hear, John Quincy turning up the volume with a flick of his iris. More lip licking, light and wet. “Today, John Adams dies… but Thomas Jefferson lives forever.”
epilogue
Charles Carroll :: November 14th 1832
The Carrolls of Carrollton have gathered finally for the end. The death of the last Signer of the Declaration of Independence. Hot November at the tail end of a hot Maryland summer. Off‐prime year for the cicadas and so only an occasional whirring reaches them through the manor walls. Good to have some of those old sounds mixed in, however faint, to bring a little organic chaos to the harmonies of Realnet.
“Great‐grandpa!” A child comes flittering, loads herself onto the quilt bulging crookedly over Carroll’s skeletal frame. “Tell me again what things were like before Realnet.”
Other voices ebb and swell in the ether, ordered in protocols to fit each silence perfectly. Odds and ends of sentences hung together in the counter‐pattern of code. Sounds toned down or up to meld perfect keys with other sounds filtering through. In Realnet, everything is like music: Andrew Jackson has just been reelected, and America is swimming along.
“Imagine,” he tells the girl, “if you were the last one who understood. The last one left alive. Come closer, my darling.”
And she phases toward, whole sections sliced and stacked upwards of themselves in the big poster bed. Charles Carroll of Carrollton works a sinewy arm out from quilts all warm with body air. At the arm’s very end, a hand holding a paper, a single twice‐folded sheet. Giggling as she takes it. “Great‐grandpa, it’s blank!”
The old man giggles, too—not but a dozen teeth between the two of them. “Damnedest thing,” he wheezes. “Only I can see it. Must be linked to the coding of my DNA.” He reaches for the letter but the little girl holds it away, and so he lets her have it. “Thomas Jefferson sent me that letter. The day he was elected President.”
“What’s a letter?”
“And some day they’re going to wonder how humans ever survived without whatever comes after Realnet.” He pats her chubby, little hand. “I want you to put this paper in the back pocket of your father’s pants.” Both of them back to giggling as she smears her colors over the surface of the room. Collected all up behind her dad, that Whig prick, still blabbering about Henry fucking Clay. Little girl with her finger pressed to her lips as she slips the paper in. Be a nice surprise for our young Whig. One last burn from the Sage of Monticello.
Little girl the shape of quilt lumps comes back full of his attentions. Right there Indian‐style denting the spread. Kid’s a wiz on Realnet. Probably this whole new crop of Americans, Carroll thinks. And we thought Doctor Benjamin Franklin’s Dream America was just the wildest thing. “Tell me, my sweet, why do you want to know what life was like before Realnet?”
She spins a finger into the dark hole of a nostril. “I do, Great‐grandpa!”
The others have all dissolved from their places in the room, left conversation feeds forgotten to take up shapes around the bed. One is seated at its foot, another weighing the mattress down with the little girl, the rest all standing. All the Carrolls of Carrollton. No excuse not to be here when you can Realnet your way on over.
“Tell her one of your stories about George Washington, Grandpa.”
“We had smartdevices,” Charles Carroll of Carrollton tells them. “And they were connected to us. Right here to your fingers. Then your eyes. Then your brain. The Internet and the real world were different things. And separate, too.”
“That’s scary.”
“Don’t scare her please, Dad.”
“Grandpa, she’ll be up all night.”
“Tell me, Great‐grandpa!”
“We had webpages. And information could move faster than a human being.”
“She has a horse, Grandpa.”
“Ah, a horse is a toy now. She has a toy, you mean.”
“Grandpa, why don’t you tell us what’s the greatest thing you ever saw.”
“The launch of Realnet.”
“Before that. Something else.”
“Do you want me to tell you or not?”
“Is it true that Thomas Jefferson invented Realnet?”
And his father, that Clay‐loving SOB, gives the kid a bop on the side of his head. “Some fucking teachers they got these days.”
“I said no politics.”
“What was it, Grandpa?”
“Wha
t was what?”
“What was the best thing you ever saw? The Constitution? The Dream? 3net?”
“Don’t know about the best, but the coolest thing I ever saw was when Jackson killed the Millipus.”
“You didn’t see that. No one did. There’s wasn’t any feed.”
But everybody else besides that Clay‐lover is listening. “Jackson had it right there, caught between the real and the Dream, and he shut the whole thing down. Not off the grid. No fucking grid. The monster, it was sliced clean in half. Half collapsing in the crash of the Dream and the other half falling dead at Old Hickory’s feet.
He killed the Millipus and The Death, too, because that’s what that thing was. It was The Death come across.”
“Wish there was some feed of it so we could experience what it was really like.”
And here comes that Clay‐loving grandson‐in‐law. “Right, but no one can because there’s no record it happened at all. A little convenient, don’t you think?”
“Convenient you’re not hanging in some Off‐Worlder crystal farm.”
“How many elections does Andrew Jackson have to win before you’ll shut up about it?”
Charles Carroll of Carrollton silences them by lifting one emaciated arm. The sleeve of his pajama shirt falls to reveal skin and bones and not much else left. Little strings of muscle that hang up there. “Whether it was The Death or not The Death, a sea monster climbed out of the ocean to swallow America. And a guy rode out there and killed it. On a horse. Now, if that guy wants to be President, maybe you better shut up and let him.”
the author would like to thank those whose
support made this book possible
Louis Armand
David Vichnar
Equus Press
Yishai Seidman
Joshua Mensch
Donna Jaffee
Scott O’Connor
Jim Ruland
Jerry Lee Atwater
Marx Cafe
Amherst Cinema
Steve Ober
Ellen Herlihy
Katherine Singer
Damien Lincoln Ober is a novelist and screenwriter. His work has appeared in The Rumpus, NOON, B O D Y Literature, the Baltimore City Paper, VLAK, and port.man.teau. He was nominated for a 2012 Pushcart Prize, and his screenplay, Randle Is Benign, was selected for the 2013 Black List.
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