The Bradbury Report

by Steven Polansky

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  A REPORT ON THE GOVERNMENT PRACTICE OF HUMAN CLONING IN THE UNITED STATES OF ...

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Thursday. July 16. 9 p.m.

  Friday. July 17. 10:15 p.m.

  Saturday. July 18. 7:30 p.m.

  Sunday. July 19. 9:15 p.m.

  Monday. July 20. 10:30 p.m.

  Tuesday. July 21. 11:30 a.m.

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright Page

  For Julie and Sylvia

  For Benjamin and Michael, again.

  A REPORT ON THE GOVERNMENT PRACTICE OF HUMAN CLONING IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA IN THE YEAR 2071 A.D., AUTHORED BY “RAYMOND BRADBURY”

  One

  I am a man who doesn’t matter. The same could be said of most men. In what follows, I will make no special claim for myself, save one, for which I can take no credit. This report will not, finally, be about me. I speak carefully here, and with regret, though not, such is my understanding of the world and its disenchanting ways, with incapacitating regret.

  I was born without particular advantage. I was neither rich nor gifted nor congenitally happy nor especially pleasing to look at. Neither was I born poor or disabled or deformed or given to chronic sadness. I had, at birth, generally what I needed. I was uterine, though not—I am sixty-six years old—engineered. My parents cared for me.

  Had I been luckier—had I, Anna might say, been sufficiently open to the operations of luck—providentially favored, my life might have been different. I might have accomplished something that served to define me, to set me apart from the mass of men of my sort. I might have discovered some leading, sustaining, purpose. I might have been happy in the way some men seem to be. I missed my chances. Or they were denied me. I am not a bad man. I have not been altogether thoughtless. I have tried to live reasonably, to avoid injuring others, whenever I have understood injury might be done. Through no egregious faults of my own, I have not mattered, do not matter, even to myself.

  I am an old man. In November—should I live to see it, which is not likely—I will be sixty-seven. This is not old, is the obvious objection. In our day, in our age, with our means, this is hardly old. But I have not aged well. I have not worked at staying young. I did not take regular exercise. I was not studious about my diet. I could not seem to get enough sleep. Or I got too much. I did not rejuvenate my teeth or hair or skin, took no treatments for adipose reduction, received no cell therapies. This was not so much lack of vanity as it was absence of enthusiasm. Like many men my age, of my means, when it became available, I did sign on for CNR replication, though I took this step without much forethought or interest. I have no progeny—that is, no sons or daughters. No one to correct or encourage me. My wife, to whom I was married only seven years in what seems a lifetime ago, died, senselessly, atavistically, I thought, in childbirth. We had chosen a boy, brown hair, green eyes—we limited our choices to these—but had not named him. I grieved. I could think of no reason to marry again. I am tired out. Seen on the streets of Lebanon, passing along, ponderously, I was taken for a man much older than I am. I have been sick. I have been, am now, and not ungratefully, near death.

  I have never had a sense of humor. I have not found funny that which, for as long as I can remember, others have laughed at. I have no skill in irony, and often mistake it for something else. Typically, I mean what I say. Against the long odds I face with language, I will try to be clear and precise.

  I am just old enough to remember the spate of books written in the first decades of this century about what used to be called “cloning.” There were scientific texts and the attendant popularizations. At least for the brief space before all discussion was curtailed, there were books that considered the ethical, legal, and regulatory issues. None of which I read. I am here thinking of the novels and stories, the fictive, speculative works of science fiction and fantasy. I am old enough to remember a number of these. I was aware of their being read; I remember hearing them spoken about. Michael Benaaron’s To Thine Own Self was, I recall, much celebrated. So, too, Richard Powers’s Twig. Evan Spire’s endless series of horror stories, clones themselves. Edward Manigault’s Sheep. A gruesome book called Zygote, and one called Alter Eden: I can’t remember who wrote them. There were also, so it seemed at the time, hundreds of movies, one hard upon the next, some taken from books, nearly all of them vulgar and silly, a few of which I must have seen in the effort to be sociable.

  This book, if one can call it that, is not science fiction, or fantasy. It is, at its heart, the account, manifestly true, of a young man, and of his courage and generosity. His preternatural humanity. At this valedictory point in my life, I was not looking for a project, or time to occupy. I want neither fame nor financial gain, could have no use for either. As a result of this report, I expect nothing will change. Should I live to finish it, it will be published only abroad, where, however widely and sympathetically it is read, it will be as so much preaching to the choir. In my own country, America, it is likely it will not be read, and, if read, not believed, and certain that a strenuous attempt will be made to discredit me, and that I will be punished if I am found. The most extraordinary measures have been taken to prevent a man like me from knowing what I know. Tyranny of the right, the left, it is all the same. It is because I survive, because I am the only one (of two) able to do it, that I write this. I am not a hero, and I am not afraid.

  I am—I can think nothing else—the only living creature, the only human in the world’s history, to have experienced time travel. (There is one other. I do not contradict myself. For Anna, the experience was markedly different, was, I’ll presume to say, less profound.) If there have been others, we do not, would not, know of them. The possibility of time travel—this hackneyed rubric will have to do for now—in the only way it will ever be possible, is, as might be predicted, an un-looked-for result, a by-product—world-reconfiguring, dangerous, sad—of Science’s insuppressible chase.

  Just over a year ago, in July, on the first inhabitable day following a prolonged nationwide inversion, I got a call, without video, from a woman I had known when I was in my early twenties. By coincidence, her call came on Louise Brown Day. It has been demonstrated mathematically that ours is a world in which coincidence is the rule, and this is, by some margin, not the least probable thing I will tell you. When I knew her, her name was Anna Weeks. Her name, now, was Anna Pearson. She’d been married, she told me, nearly forty years, to a wonderful, loving man (her words) somewhat older than she. He’d died, preventably, in the past year. She was still in mourning. They’d had three children, all of them now grown. She still lived in Iowa. She was retired from teaching. Disqualified for payout from her husband’s life insurance, she subsisted on her pension. I learned this last fact later.

  We’d been graduate students together at Iowa State, in Ames. She was a native of Iowa. She had come to the university as an undergraduate and stayed on. I was born and raised in New Hampshire, but had come to Iowa by way of William and Mary, in Virginia. We were both seeking federal licensure as high school teachers, she in history, I in math. She was a year ahead of me. For reasons I have always wanted to think had nothing to do with me, she didn’t finish her degree, leaving the university, and Ames, in the middle of the second, and final, year of the program. Even without a master’s, she was able to secure a teaching job in the small town where she had grown up, in the high school she’d atten
ded. We’d corresponded for a few months after she left the university. When she called, I had not seen her in over forty years.

  This is a sad story. One in which I do not acquit myself with much sensitivity or nobility. I was twenty-two, but that is no excuse. I tell it because it bears on the rest.

  In late August, forty-five years ago, two weeks before classes were to start, I drove to Iowa from New Hampshire in an ancient Volvo hybrid I’d nursed through college. In the trunk were six or seven cases of canned tuna fish, which my mother, who died shortly thereafter from ovarian cancer, had purchased and stowed there for me. This was when safe tuna was available and affordable. I’d declined to live in subsidized campus housing and had taken a furnished apartment in town, above a Hmong gift shop.

  I had never been to Iowa before and arrived knowing no one. My first night in town, I took a walk around the campus to acquaint myself with it. It was a Sunday evening, still light, summer break, and the campus was quiet. I thought the place architecturally undistinguished but not uninviting. I understand improvements in the physical plant have been made; I have not been back since I finished my degree. At some point in my walk I encountered Anna Weeks, now Anna Pearson. Perhaps she was sitting on a bench, reading, beneath one of the campus’s signature miracle elms. Or she was sitting cross-legged on a blanket in some grassy spot. These are scenes at once recognizable from romantic simulations. I don’t remember where she was, or how, exactly, we began a conversation. I do remember she joined me on my walk. She felt great affection for the place, had been there five years—four as an undergraduate—and was eager to serve as guide. We walked most of the campus that evening. I was tired from my drive, and not an energetic companion. At my best, I would not have been sparkling. But I enjoyed her company. She was intelligent, and articulate, and lively. We wound up in town, near my apartment, at a twenty-four-hour patisserie. We sat and talked for several more hours, until I was nearly stuporous. We agreed to meet the following day.

  Anna was lonely. This would have been unmistakable to most people. I didn’t see it. She was a large woman, a bit ungainly, though not unattractive. As an undergraduate in Ames, she had picked up the nickname “Twink,” which she carried with dignity and humor. She urged me to use this sobriquet, which, I see now, I should have done but then refused to do, telling her, stupidly, it made me sad. When I heard other people call her Twink, I felt angry—at them, at her.

  For the two weeks prior to the start of classes, we spent at least some part of every day together. Anna was a great help to me. She advised me on classes and professors to take and avoid, led me through the baroque registration protocols, showed me where to buy texts and supplies. She and I had become friends. We ate together at least one meal a day. We went to movies. Of her choosing. I accompanied her, pretending to an opinion while she shopped for her fall clothes. One afternoon, in my old Volvo, we drove out of Ames, making a circuit of nearly two hundred and fifty miles in the Iowa countryside—this was well before the Clearances, before the havoc-playing influx of originals from the Dakotas—stopping for beefsteaks and sweet potato fries at a vestigial roadhouse in a town called Le Mars, not far from Anna’s home. I remember being unimpressed by the landscape or, better said, impressed by its uniformity. It is a wonder I was willing to undertake this trip. I found Anna affable and easy to talk to. Doubtless I was circumspect. I am more than slow to reveal myself; I almost never do it. It is not fear that constrains me, or modesty, or decorousness, but lack of interest. Even with my wife, whom I loved, I was decidedly less than intimate.

  Anna talked avidly, in large swaths, without inhibition. I don’t remember what she talked about. I believe much of the time I was attentive; I carried with me through the after-years a fairly elaborated sense of her. I knew she was keen on literature and film. I knew she was an only child, that her parents divorced when she was very young, that her mother had raised her in straitened circumstances, that in high school she’d had no boyfriends, in college one terrible, sociopathic suitor, that her father was absent and unkind. She was full of self-deprecating humor, full of political fervor (she belonged to several anti-government action groups), which, in her case, was authentic and not a means to sexual encounter. She was a good storyteller, and, as much as I enjoyed anyone’s company at that place, in those days, I enjoyed hers.

  With the beginning of term, I saw Anna less often. Because she was a year ahead of me, we had no classes in common. I did not yet have other friends, as she did, competing for my time. We met several times a week for lunch or dinner. On these occasions, we were alone. She saw to this, fending off her friends, sparing me, I assumed, their society. In all this time, which amounted to most of the first term, I did not touch her. We did not kiss or hold hands. She did not come up to my apartment. I did not see her room in the graduate residence. Whatever those observing us may have thought, between ourselves we did not characterize or speak of our affections. We were chummy. We were not romantic. I didn’t think much about our friendship, apart from being thankful I had someone to talk to from time to time. I had no idea what she was thinking.

  I did not tell Anna about the girl, still at William and Mary, who thought she and I were to be married soon after her graduation in the spring. We’d made no formal plan, but that was the understanding. We’d grown up together in New Hampshire. I’d known her since grade school. She’d been my only girlfriend in high school, and, after a year apart, she followed me to Williamsburg. Our families were close. We shared a history, seamless and literally lifelong. We were tied in all manner of ways. She’d had other, more advantageous options, but chose William and Mary to be with me. In her sophomore year there, with what was unconscionable slovenliness, I got her pregnant. I arranged and paid for the abortion. For much of high school, and through several years of college, I imagined I loved this girl, in the inchoate, mindless way I imagined love. I did not mention her to Anna. This was, in part, because I saw no reason to; in part, because I felt diminished by my attachment—it had, by that time, begun to feel slavish and unimaginative—to the girl in Virginia, whose name will here be Ann. That this omission was calculated and self-serving needs no remarking. But I think it is true that, had I thought it was in any way caddish of me not to tell Anna about Ann, I would have told her. That there was a girl in Virginia, to whom I was preemptively attached, to whom I bore some overriding responsibility, had nothing to do with the nature and degree of my feelings for Anna, which would have been what they were, girl or no girl. I liked Anna. I felt some unwarranted pity for her, which, I fear, might have given me a puerile pleasure I was not, at the time, above. I did not love Anna, felt toward her no physical attraction, and did not want her for anything other than friendship.

  In early November, I met, purely by chance, one of Anna’s three roommates, an undergraduate, who for three years had been Anna’s closest friend at the university. Before she married me, her name was Sara Bird. I was on campus, in the automat, eating lunch. Anna and her roommate were already there, though the place was crowded and I didn’t see them until I was nearly finished. They came over to my table. Anna introduced her.

  Sara Bird. Twenty-one years old. From Indianola, outside Des Moines. Her father, briefly my father-in-law, was a minister in the moribund Episcopal Church. In the public gaze, he was an exemplary man—learned, wise, well-spoken, elegant in bearing, reverent, refined. In private, to his wife and three children, he was despotic. I was given a glimpse of the domestic version. It was enough to eradicate in me whatever remnants of Christian faith there might have been; merely being in his presence, I was determined, as was then the expression, to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There is no question he was the principal cause of most, if not all, of Sara’s emotional debilities. Her mother, an aristocratic Norwegian, born into the Lutheran Church, who, after nearly thirty years in America, spoke only a rudimentary English, was of no use in preventing or even tempering her husband’s attacks, which found, as their favorite target, the eldes
t child, the beautiful, languid, exceedingly vulnerable Sara. For seven years I hated him. I watched him closely whenever he was around her. I was poised to intervene, eager to expose him for what he was. (I was delusional. I was in my twenties. I would have been no match for the man.) When Sara died I stopped just short of blaming him expressly. I did prevent him from presiding at the funeral. Afterwards, I had nothing more to do with him.

  Sara became my wife. I lived with her seven years. I knew her better than I had known anyone before, or since. I loved her as I have loved no one else. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. From the first, I was aware how idiosyncratic this judgment was. She was thin and pale. In repose, her face was sad. There was a darkness about her. Her eyes were sunken and shadowed. She was quiet, formal, flinchy, because she was delicate, easily hurt. I talk about her this way to Anna—who is, she says now, beyond being hurt by it—and she remarks I might be describing some vaporous nineteenth-century heroine. For me, all these melancholy accoutrements constituted her beauty, which was ethereal, asexual, for all her sadnesses, serene. She was irresistible.

  At that first meeting, other than to say hello, she did not speak. She was glad to let Anna do the talking. Once I knew who she was, as is the way, I began to see her frequently on campus. She was not easy to talk to, or to get at. If she was not with Anna, which made awkward any overture, she was almost always in the midst of a herd of students, her fellow undergraduates, male and female, as unlike her as they could be: noisy, raw, lighthearted savages, careering about as if they believed they would never die. She told me, later, she despised them. But among them, she said, in the thick of their rout, their collective spasm, she felt anesthetized, blanketed, needing never to speak or think.

  When I went back to New Hampshire for Thanksgiving, I still had not had the chance to speak with Sara alone. The Monday before Thanksgiving, my mother died. She’d been sick a long time. A common case of extended morbidity. The end, however, was precipitous. I was her only child, very nearly her only kin, and it properly fell to me to make the arrangements for her funeral. Though we had not been as close as she’d wanted, I’d loved my mother. I did not get the chance to see her before she died. I was now alone—my father was long dead—without family. Ann had come up from Virginia for the holiday. She was a support to me at the funeral, and I was grateful for her presence there. It was the last time I would see her. Ann, Anna, Sara. Three women. A mysterious conflation: the only three women in my life, all at once. By the time I got back to Ames, obeying an animal instinct to avoid any additional pain, I had, if not forgotten Sara Bird, pretty much scrapped whatever designs I’d had.