The Bradbury Report

by Steven Polansky

  As would be true for any American my age, I remember the riots in North and South Dakota. It was a bitter political fight (in a more passionate, less fatalistic age, there would have been civil war) between the states and the federal government, over the latter’s attempt—wielding the doctrine of eminent domain, pushing it far past, despotically past, it was widely felt, its legal and already flagrantly overextended bounds—to appropriate the entirety of what were the Dakotas as an integral part of the process, the government’s depopulation of those two states, in the space of four years, forcibly evicting all the “original” residents—one and a half million of them: men, women, children, and their chattel—giving these flinty heartlanders top dollar for their houses (which were summarily razed) and businesses, and adequately funding their relocation. All of this in order to repopulate the subsequently renamed territory with clones, and all the high- and low-tech ordnance of the cloning enterprise. When this happened, I was in my early forties, living alone in New Hampshire, far from the theater of conflict.

  When Sara and I were on our honeymoon in Scotland, in the Trossachs, on Loch Voil, I read—by pure chance—one quiet afternoon while Sara was napping, an historical novel about the Highland Clearances. I might have been outside; the afternoon was fine. I chose instead to remain indoors, near Sara, in our bedroom, to be near her. To watch her sleep was, still, a new and almost discomposing delight. In sleep her face was—this said without irony or self-parody—beatific. Her hands by her head on the pillow were pretty and delicate. I felt blessed by this woman, by her physical presence, her spirit, by her incomprehensible willingness to love me. (The language is religious. I was not.) I felt lucky, beyond all just expectation. This was nearly two decades before the government’s decision to confiscate the land of North and South Dakota. When I still read books.

  We were staying in a sixteenth-century great house, what seemed to us a small castle, made of a rose-colored stone, set back maybe a hundred yards from the shore of the loch. It was mid-September. We were married September 12. It is a day, a date, that has kept its power. The mornings there were cold and misty, the afternoons clear, the light off the loch unearthly. “Fourth dimensional,” Sara said, by which she meant not Time, but the supranatural clarity of things. By nature she was reticent and self-contained—I loved this in her—and not given to such pronouncements. At breakfast, in addition to the eggs and sausage and bacon, there was fried bread that came slotted in a silver rack. We had never, either of us, seen fried bread before. There was also a kind of oatcake—very dry and stiff, barely edible—squat jars of homemade preserves, clotted cream, and a quilted tea cozy done up like a Cheshire cat. We ate everything. We were a week in the Trossachs, then another week down in Edinburgh and the Borders.

  The book I read that afternoon was called The Highland Clearances —according to the back of the jacket, it was popular in its day. It retailed a series of events, especially brutal, and entirely unknown to me, that occurred in the north of Scotland in the late-eighteenth and early-ninteenth centuries, when, by force of arms—bayonet, truncheon, pike, fire—the English removed from their homes tens of thousands of men, women, and children, in order to make room for their, the English’s, grandiose vision involving the large-scale farming of sheep. The book was written by a man named Prebble—Richard or Robert or John—sometime, I think, in the second half of the last century. I remember this name, because at the end of our honeymoon, fourteen supernal, irrecoverable days, the night before we were to fly from Glasgow back to Boston, we stayed at a bed-and-breakfast, unforgettably elegant, near the English border, in the sweetly named town of Peebles.

  During the abysmal, godforsaken years when the Dakotas were evacuated (another state-engendered euphemism, as if the land, itself, was dangerous), the prior and analogous event was, so far as I recall, never invoked by either side. (Is there today anyone—excepting professional historians, diehard clansmen, and those like Anna, those, I mean, with whom she is in league, who make it their business to know such things—who knows anything about the Highland Clearances?) It must be that whichever functionary came up with the new and official name for the erstwhile Dakotas was at least somewhat familiar with the Scottish instance. Was the choice of name cynical? (Could the name, the concept it revived, have given rise to the action?) Was it sardonic? Coldly, recklessly arrogant? Psychopathic? Can a state be psychopathic? We know it can.

  On Wednesday evening, as we were going to bed (I need not say: she to her bedroom, I to mine), Anna told me that, because I’d been in the hospital nearly all of the first three days she was in New Hampshire, she was extending by one day her stay with me. If I didn’t object. I did object. I would have been overjoyed to hear she was cutting short her visit. But I was unwilling to say so. Her plan had been to arrive one Saturday and leave the next. Now she would stay until Sunday.

  However pushy or presuming I’ve made her sound, Anna was not once during her stay—nor has she been since—insensitive. She was, and is, careful, painstaking about my feelings. In all other ways, too, painstaking. Until the minute she began to say what she had come to say, she was perplexed about how, or when, best to say it. Rightly, she felt she needed to spend enough time with me—was a week enough time, given, especially, how standoffish I’d been in her presence?—to be able to assess the kind of man I had become. She was unwilling to rely on impressions, less so on feelings, some forty-five years old. Having heard her out, how would I respond? What would I do? I prefer to believe—Anna assures me it is true—she was not afraid I would betray her. To pose the question starkly: was I emotionally, and now, physically up to hearing what she would say, to face what she would bring me to face, up to being and doing what she would ask? She wasn’t sure, despite her unwavering certainty about the justness of her cause, despite the categorical nature of her charge (which included no trace of concern for my welfare), that she had the right to involve me, to put me, in several ways, at serious risk.

  That Friday night—the second-to-last night of her time with me—Anna initiated the fateful conversation, in which, for my own peace of mind, I had willed myself to lose all interest.

  We had just eaten dinner, which Anna prepared in my out-of-date, underequipped kitchen. I can’t remember what we ate that night; but it would likely have been meatless (chilaquile? ratatouille? kung pao mock duck?), and it would have been good. Anna is an accomplished cook. Everything she fixed for me—that visit, and later—was good. I could not have loved Sara more than I did, but it would be fair to say that as a cook, my wife was erratic, ambitious beyond the reach of her skills, overzealous in her use of spices, indifferent to matters of presentation, and odd in her ideas about what went well with what.

  We were sitting in the living room, my wife’s old friend and I. I had done the dishes, which was the arrangement we’d tacitly adopted: Anna cooked the evening meal, shopped for the ingredients; I cleaned up after. Since Sara’s death, lunch, when I thought to eat it, was usually catch-as-catch-can. Four times a week on average, sometime after one o’clock when the lunch rush subsides, I walked into town and got a sandwich or soup at what I’ll call here, for old times’ sake, the New Times Café. This didn’t change with Anna’s arrival. If anything, I was more eager for reasons to leave the house, and did so, not only for lunch, but whenever I could come up with a plausible—and, you have to believe, perfectly unconvincing—excuse. I assured Anna she was welcome to join me on these furloughs, which, in all instances, she declined to do. Because, of course, she, too, was uncomfortable in the awkwardnesses of our cohabitation—likely more uncomfortable than I, as she was not in her own home—and happy to see me leave.

  It was 7:30. I was on the couch, a lumpy, scratchy thing (I mean the couch, though I had more than a few lumps myself), looking halfheartedly at a newsweekly Anna had picked up on one of her shopping excursions. She was sitting in a threadbare old wing chair—already a secondhand piece when Sara and I came upon it early in our marriage—which was where I cust
omarily sat. Her feet were up, shoes off, on a needlepoint-covered footstool Sara bought to dress up the chair. We had not spoken in several minutes, not an easy interval of silence to abide. I was thinking there was just this night to get through, then one more night, then Anna would leave. Then I saw she’d put down the book she was reading—I don’t remember what it was, but it was thick—and was staring at me. There was nothing combative in the way she looked at me. I would have said doleful. I sought for something harmless to say.

  “When did you stop eating meat?” was what I produced. “When I knew you, you were not vegetarian.”

  “It’s mostly red meat I won’t eat,” she said. “I was not a lot of things when you knew me. I was not a wife. I was not a mother. Not a teacher.” She listed her vocations—they were for her clearly that—with real passion, for which I envied her. She shook her head, as if to clear it of a disconcerting scene. “I don’t know what I was. When you knew me. I was hardly anything. And, anyway, why? Was the dinner bad?”

  “No. No. It was delicious. You’re a wonderful cook.”

  “I am satisfactory, just,” she said. “You’re easily pleased. My husband was a far better cook than I am.” She spoke of her husband, whenever she did, by name, which I won’t give here. “He was wonderful in the kitchen.” She smiled.

  “You miss him.” I had become, more and more with age, master of the obvious.

  She laughed at me. “I do. Of course I do.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Ray,” she said. She was turning the conversation, taking charge. Again the way she said my name made me feel a little less absent. She took off her reading glasses, put them on the occasional table beside her, turned off the lamp. We were not quite in the dark; under circumstances less tense I might have taken the chance to doze. “Probably better,” she said, “if I can’t see you very well while we talk. I’m afraid I might lose my nerve.”

  “You’re not afraid of me,” I said. “Goodness.”

  “I’m not afraid of you. It’s that, for all your pretense at rudeness, you seem such a kind old man.”

  “I don’t know how kind I am,” I said. “I’m beginning to dodder. But I don’t know that I feel very kind. I wouldn’t depend too much on that.”

  “Oh, no. I do depend on that. And it worries me.”

  I considered keeping silent at this point, as a means, maybe, of demonstrating how contingent my kindness could be, but more as a way of forestalling whatever it was coming at me. “Worries you because?” I said.

  “Because this will be hard on you. It is hard on me. It will be harder on you. I wish that weren’t the case.”

  “Why don’t we forget it, then?”

  “Tell me this,” she said. “What do you know about cloning?” When I didn’t answer right away, she said, “This is the best I can do. There is no graceful way to start. I’m not asking what you think, necessarily. I’m asking what you know.”

  “I don’t know anything.” Which was true. “I don’t think anything.” Also true.

  “Not an overly impressive stance.” There was affection in her voice.

  “I have no stance.” I felt piteously little affection for her then. “I know nothing about cloning. Should I? I guess I’m ashamed to say it, but I don’t.”

  “Your shame—mock if you want—is not the issue.”

  “No mocking,” I said. “What are we talking about?”

  “All right,” she said. “Listen to what I tell you.”

  “I’ll listen,” I said, “if you’ll turn on the light. Would you mind? I can’t do this in the dark. It’s too theatrical. Leave your glasses off if you don’t want to see me. I need to see you. If we’re going to do this.”

  She turned the lamp back on—I’d been harsh; I could see I’d hurt her feelings—and left her glasses on the table where she’d put them.

  “I don’t mean to be theatrical. What I mean to do, what I’ve come to do, is tell you what you’ll need to know.”

  “In order to?”

  “I’ll get to that,” she said. “Will you let me speak?”

  “Please,” I said.

  “I am a small part,” Anna said, “of a group that opposes cloning, a group for whom cloning is a national, as well as personal, disgrace. It is morally and in every other way abhorrent. We believe cloning damns the soul of this country, if this country still has a soul, and the souls of all of us who stand by, do nothing. And we are determined to use all available means, short of armed insurrection, to put an end to this practice.”

  I wondered here, but didn’t ask, what they planned to do about the conceivably hundreds of millions of clones already in existence. Would these creatures, I didn’t know how else to think of them, have the sins of their makers visited on them?

  “We are too few, too covert, to be a coherent force. So long as we are small, so long as what we say and do makes no difference, we are tolerated by the government. Perhaps, without knowing it, we are even indulged. The general population ignores us. We are only loosely conjoined, intentionally so. I don’t really know any of the others. I know a scant few of them only by sight. I know no one’s name.”

  The configuration she described—the system of isolate, atomistic, say, three-person action cells designed to prevent discovery and capture of greater numbers—was familiar to me from a film I’d seen when I was a boy. It was an old, old film, in black and white—I can’t imagine where my friend got the disk—called The Battle of Algiers. I had not heard of it then, have not heard it referred to since. It was the first foreign film I’d seen, the first time I’d had to contend with subtitles. It moved me inordinately. As I remember, it filled me with a direction-less fervor and indignation, and a completely unearned sense of my own virtue, none of which persisted much beyond the afternoon I spent watching it. Was there some secret handshake or gesture, a single mutating password, or a call-and-response sequence of trigger words, with which one member of Anna’s group identified herself to another? I wanted to ask this, too.

  “My husband was in the group before I was. He was in it from the first. He’d had a voice in shaping it. This was before we married, before I met him, before the state took over the dirty work and made it policy. When the replication program was instituted, he refused to participate. As I did. As you did not. This is a truth hard for me to make peace with, but he would probably be alive still if there had been a clone. I believe he was right to do what he did. I believed in him, in what he believed. I involved myself in the resistance; I stayed involved through all the frustrating and fruitless years. I’m still involved, probably, because of him.”

  Here she stopped. She picked up her glasses and put them on. She rose. “Give me a minute,” she said. She went into the kitchen, from which she called out, “Can I get you something?”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  I heard the microwave kick on. She came back with a mug of tea. She sat down and left her glasses on. What she said next was different in substance and tone, more confidential. It was something, I believe, she had not expected to say.

  “This is too much for me, I’m afraid. Too costly. I’m no longer up to it, if I ever was. And now, with what has happened, without him, I’ve been asked to go past where I should ever have been asked to go. Past, really, where I’m willing to go.”

  I could see she was ready to cry. I said nothing. I watched while she sought to compose herself. I tried to help her by assuming, seated on the couch, what I meant to be a sympathetic posture. We are, all things considered, a ridiculous species, not worth copying.

  “I don’t want to be here, Ray. I can’t say for sure what my husband would have wanted me to do. I don’t want to bring you into this. I am not taking revenge, if that’s what you’ve been thinking. I’m not. I’m not vengeful, towards you or anyone. I don’t have it in me. Over the years, when I thought of you at all, I thought of you kindly. I wished you well. And Sara. I don’t want to be in this, myself. I want to be at home, or visit
ing my children. I want to be with their children. I regret every minute not in their presence, one or the other of them. I want to be at ease. You understand this. I want to be easy. I’m not sick, but I’ve begun to wear down. As much as I can, I want to enjoy what’s left. However this goes, whatever happens, this will be the last of it for me. And it will not go well.”

  I am not a man who is undone by a woman crying. In the seven years we were married, I watched Sara cry many times. What you’d expect in the routine course of things. Not once, I want to believe, was it the result of intentional cruelty on my part.