The Bradbury Report

by Steven Polansky

  After they’d got him in the car, the older man, the tall one with the scary hands, came back into the kitchen to tell me about the new plan. He said he could give me only the basics, that I’d be given more detail in the coming days. They want me to contact Ray. They want me to go see him. They want Ray to meet his clone, face to face. They want Ray to spend time with his clone, then write about how it feels, what it means. They don’t even know Ray. Neither do I, really. They want me to persuade him to do this. When it is published, he said, Ray’s account will be of tremendous importance. I am to act as liaison, as chaperone, as nurse. I am to see to the clone’s needs. I am to teach him survival skills, teach him about the world, about who and what he is. I am to make him presentable. They want me to teach him to speak, if he can’t already, well enough that one day he might speak all over the world about the evils of cloning. Until he is ready for that, the tall man said, and until Ray’s account is written, I am, no matter what the cost, to keep the clone alive and safe. I won’t do it, I told him. You will, he said. We need you to. I won’t, I said. And please leave my house.

  He did leave then. On the kitchen table I saw the photograph I’d intended to give the clone to take with him. It was a picture of my daughter’s children, a fairly recent one. He’d seen it on the dresser in my bedroom when we were walking around the house looking at things, naming them. Of all that he saw, he seemed to like this picture. It’s a nice picture. The kids are cute. They are wonderful kids. I don’t know why he took such a shine to it. I took it out of the frame and put it on the table in the kitchen so I’d be sure not to forget to give it to him. When I saw it on the table, I wept. I was pretty much undone. I heard the garage door open. The car started up. I knew I would do what they’d asked.

  Seven

  Yesterday was September 12. I spent the day as I have spent every day the last month, in the apartment, in bed, writing my report. My report. Makes me sound like a clerk, a scrivener, a petty bureaucrat. What do I think I am?

  September 12 is a hard day for me. In New Hampshire it was almost invariably hot, and weeks before the leaves turned color. School had started, and most years I spent much of the day in the sweaty, smelly classroom, negotiating the rules of engagement with my students, the majority of whom were sweaty and smelly and also mulish. Each year I looked for small ways to distinguish the day. I never found a way—something explicit I might do, some ceremonial or commemorative gesture—that felt sufficiently dignified (with regard to Sara’s dignity, not mine), that didn’t feel contrived or false. Anyway, the day would distinguish itself. For the part of the day I was awake, especially when the 12th fell on the weekend and I could find no distraction in work, I was plainly sad, mournful. Without needing a conscious effort to do this, I held Sara in my mind. At school or out, I kept her face before me, and it filled me with regret. Conversely, no matter how I tried, I could no longer hear her voice, or feel the skin of her hands, the shape of her fingers and nails, and this, too, pained me. Her face by its presence, her voice, her hands, by their absence, I was boxed in by longing and sorrow. Was this not true for other days? All other days? It was easier this year, for whatever reason. It would have been our forty-third anniversary. Perhaps it was not being in the house in New Hampshire. I lived in that house forty-two years. Sara was there with me seven years only, but the house was hers. From the start. She chose the house. It was her money that permitted us to buy it. She made of it a home, and it remained hers all the years I lived there, a guest, a pensioner, without her.

  I didn’t read Anna’s journal right away. I could not bring myself to pick it up. I was annoyed she’d left it for me, annoyed she’d written it. When, finally, I submitted—the thing occupied the kitchen table, Anna-like, demanding to be read—I found it moving and very disturbing. I felt sorry for the clone, sorry for Anna. I felt intimidated, scared, about the prospect of meeting and spending time with my clone. I also felt curious—curiosity more than a little prurient—to know what Anna had done that she wished she hadn’t. But these were largely superficial feelings. (There is no way I could have known, or even have begun to imagine, what it would be like to encounter, in the mind-bending, time-trumping flesh, my own clone.) On what I’d like to believe was a somewhat deeper level, I felt ashamed of my essentially mindless, but now quite momentous decision to participate in the government’s CNR program—to have, that is, in plain English, myself cloned.

  I read the first section, the preamble, straight through. Then, after a break for soup and a sandwich downtown, I read the journal entries. As, to a much greater extent, is manifestly true, too, of me, Anna is unable to forego references to her personal life. I was happy to read these passages. On the drive to Montreal, and afterwards during our brief stay in that lovely city, though I’m sure we spoke of other things, it seemed all Anna wanted to talk about was her husband. Her love for him was impressive, admirable. For me it was also chastening. Then how is it that, just three months after his death, she seemed already—in these pages, on the road, in Montreal—to be easy talking about him, already to have made her peace with his loss? Perhaps she made this peace, and kept it, precisely by talking about him as freely as she did. Hers is a mature response. It has been more than thirty-five years, and I am still not easy talking about Sara. Nor have I been able to find anything like a similar peace. Maybe because, compared to Anna and her husband, Sara and I were together so short a time. Maybe the way she died—tragic, anachronistic, like some pioneer wife—explains it, and how young. Maybe I am simply pathetic and weak. More to the point, solipsistic. There is no grief loftier, more important than my own.

  (My son died, too. I never saw him. Anna spoke about cloning the dead. Imagine. I might have raised my wife and my son, a little girl and little boy, together.)

  I find not much honor or consolation in this enterprise, but I will honor, if I can, my agreement with Anna’s group and try to finish this account, as expeditiously as I can.

  Anna called me, as she said she would, three days from the time she left New Hampshire. It was Thursday, August 13. She was back in Iowa. The conversation was short.

  “How was your trip?” I said.

  “Long. Tedious. Flat. I’m glad to be home. How are you feeling?”

  “The same as when you left. I feel decrepit. I feel fragile. Moderately bewildered. I was waiting for your call.”

  “Here it is,” she said. “I didn’t want to call you.”

  “But you did.”

  “I told you I would,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I read your journal. What did you call it, your notebook.”

  When she didn’t respond, I said, “It was hard to read.”

  “Sorry to put you through it.” That had some edge. Then she softened. “It was hard to write.”

  “I’m sure it was,” I said. “No. It was good.”

  “Good?”

  “I mean remarkable. Sad. I’ve tried to think what to say to you. It was very moving. It was helpful. Incriminating. It made me feel trifling. Worse. I’ve been cavalier, oblivious. I’ve been inexcusably ignorant. There’s a human being here.”

  “There are three human beings here,” she said.

  “Yes. Of course. Anyway. It was really something to read.”

  “Good,” she said. “Then good. Then it’s good you read it.”

  “It is good.”

  “Now be smart,” she said.

  “Listen. Anna.” I said. “I’m not all that steady. If you try to dissuade me, you might succeed. Why don’t you just ask me if I’ll do it, and let me answer?”

  “Have you given this enough thought?”

  “Definitely not,” I said. “You called to ask me.”

  “Wait,” she said. “I have to say this. If I’d had the presence of mind, when I first saw the clone, to keep quiet, they’d never have known about you. You wouldn’t be involved.”

  “Probably true,” I said. “But irrelevant. I don’t blame you, Anna. As far as I can
tell, I’m not sorry. Maybe I will be.”

  “You will,” she said.

  “Maybe I will.”

  “Meaning you want to do this?”

  “Do I want to? I think I do. I’m willing to do it,” I said. “If you ask me to. And provided you and your group accept my conditions.”

  “I’ll have nothing to do with it,” she said. “For goodness sake, it will not be up to me. You must believe that.”

  “I do believe it,” I said. “Then provided they accept my conditions.”

  “What are they? Your conditions.”

  “I want no direct contact, at any time, with anyone in your group. Excepting you. I am not one of them. If I do this, I do it because I’ve chosen to, for reasons of my own. Which are none of their business. They need to agree they will try to exert no influence over what I write. Will they agree to that? Whoever they are?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what they’ll do.”

  “Will you tell them what I said?”

  “I am sorry to hear this, Ray,” she said. “I am very sorry.”

  “But you’ll tell them,” I said.

  “I don’t know that I will.”

  “Well, that’s your decision,” I said.

  In truth, I had given my decision very little thought, considering the nature and putative risk of what was asked of me. I made the decision so quickly and casually—I believe I knew what I would do before Anna left New Hampshire—I wonder now at my nonchalance. It was, I have to say, less a decision, really, then a relinquishment, a relaxation. I relaxed into the idea that I would do this. I mean, almost involuntarily, I let fall away all resistance to the idea. Was it because I felt, not altogether wrongly, that I had nothing now to lose, and the very same to live for? (Are these two calculations always equal?) To state the obvious in the obvious way, I was living on borrowed time. If I allowed it to, my heart attack (the first one) might mark the beginning of a new epoch for me. The final epoch—brief, intense, possibly even meaningful. Might I, who had never given off a single spark, go out in a blaze? Was it that, finally, I didn’t believe the danger—about which, from the start, Anna had been so insistent—was real? How much had my decision to do with my taking the opportunity to make some amends to Anna for the way I had treated her so long ago? Even I could see how much she was putting at risk. As it was my clone who had been found outside the Clearances, perhaps I felt, however ill-definedly, I ought to do something. Or did I, in some bizarre, unprecedented way—had anyone, before me, been in this position?—feel as if I owed it to my self?

  No need for this plurality of explanations. The truth here is most likely simple. I had nothing better, nothing else, to do. And I wanted to see my clone. To see myself, again, as I was at twenty-one.

  I had exactly a week to settle my affairs before Anna came back to get me. (She asked me to do it. I said I would.) I continued to believe I would eventually return to New Hampshire, notwithstanding Anna told me I was to take nothing with me but the clothes and personal articles I might need. Anna was all benevolence, but you’d have to say, given the apocalyptic contexts in which they’d been issued before, the sadists and more ordinary run of killers who had issued them, those instructions had a dread resonance. At the very least, they suggested that what we were about to do would not end happily.

  A word about money, a subject I haven’t before now had reason to talk about, and to which I have rarely given any thought. It is not that I consider the subject of money vulgar and dull. I am not above the subject, just outside it. I don’t think about money, because I have a lot of it, and because very little of what I have comes from any effort of mine. I am the beneficiary, ongoing, of Sara’s familial wealth, relative to which my salary as a high school mathematics teacher was pin money. Had I not been so freed from pecuniary concerns, I would, I’m pretty sure, have been as grubbing and as boorish as the next. I can too easily imagine being the kind of man who thought about, and strived for, not much else.

  Anna told me we could not use personal checks or traveler’s checks or credit cards or cash machines during our time in Canada, as any of those would leave a trail easily followed. How would we live? How would we eat? I felt entitled to ask. When we got to Montreal, she said, a sufficient sum would be waiting for us. Who from? Her group? Yes, she said. She explained they assumed the government would make sure I did not live long enough after the publication of my report to enjoy any of the profits that might accrue. These profits, per an agreement she would bring with her for me to sign, would revert to the group and, they were confident, would more than defray their investment in us. How sufficient? I asked. Enough for us to live on, she said.

  I was not reassured. One of the first things I did in the time I had before Anna came back was to go to the bank and withdraw from my account sixty thousand dollars. Such a sum would, I knew—when, ultimately, the government’s attention turned towards me—be suspicious, even damning. I did not tell Anna I’d done this until after we got to Canada. She was angry and alarmed, as you’d have expected her to be, though it was too late for her to do anything about it. When I came to pack my bag, I put the sixty thousand—I’d asked for it in hundred-dollar bills—in three old L. L. Bean boot socks I had in my drawer, twenty thousand stuffed in each sock.

  I was to leave my house as if I’d gone on vacation and intended to return. I was not to sell my car, or anything else I might think of selling. (Besides the house, I owned not a thing anyone would want.) When I quit New Hampshire I would leave behind, presumably for good, my adult past, the signal period of which—the only period I cared about—was my time with Sara. Most of that time, we were in the Lebanon house.

  Before we moved to New Hampshire, we were in Iowa together at the university just shy of two years. We were married in September, on the 12th, at the start of my second academic year there. Sara had graduated the previous June. (By then, Anna had left the university.) For Sara’s sake, so she need not fret, and so her father could cut a stylish and sacerdotal figure without having to contend with me, I stayed clear of Commencement. Afterwards, Sara assured me she was willing to hang on in Ames another year, while I finished my degree. I knew—how could I not know?—she was desperate to get out of Iowa and away from her family. Had it not been for me, she would have been on her way to the Sorbonne. Yet I was happy to keep her there.

  Contact with her father had become unbearable, an already strained and ambiguous relationship then made much worse by the fact of our marriage. Which fact her father found, in every way, appalling. I had not before in my life been by anyone brought so close to hatred, for all that Sara was his daughter, of his blood. He went mad. He flew into a frenzy, a rage, which, it was plain to see, was chiefly jealousy. He would not talk to Sara about our marriage, in the lead-up to it, except to say that in marrying me she was not just stooping, but slumming, trawling along the bottom. He characterized Sara’s choice of me as, his exact words, nothing more than a postpubescent gesture of rebellion. (Which, at least in part, it was, however full of heart and nerve.) If she married me, he said without a touch of humility or charity, she’d be condemning herself to a life without refinement, without grace (he meant this not in the theological sense), without meaning or value, to a life spiritually, and in all other ways, impoverished. He refused to give her his blessing.

  We’d decided on a civil ceremony, in Ames. He was convinced her decision to be married outside the church, outside his church—he communicated this to Sara through her mother—was intended as an insult to him. He didn’t come to the wedding. After we were married, he would not talk to Sara at all. (It was only six years later, when Sara told her mother she was pregnant, that he spoke to her again.) He attempted to prevent Sara’s mother and siblings from going to the wedding, insisting that their presence would constitute a flagrant betrayal of him. For what might have been the first time in their conjugal life, Sara’s mother opposed him. She came to the ceremony in Ames, and brought with her Sara’s brot
her and sister. It was not an easy or joyous occasion for her or for Sara’s siblings, but they were there with us. I was grateful to her then, and I would have further reason for gratitude. When Sara and I moved to New Hampshire, her mother gave us, as a housewarming present, the down payment, and considerably more than that, for the house in Lebanon. This, as we were to understand, without her husband’s approval or knowledge. Similarly, all the money Sara came into upon reaching the age of twenty-one—more money than we could conceivably spend—derived from a long-standing, generation-skipping trust established by her mother’s side of the family. This was money over which her father had no say, and it was this aspect of Sara’s inheritance, about which money I felt some misguided and prideful ambivalence, that allowed me to reconcile myself to what a chimp could have seen was my great good fortune. Sara’s father disowned her. We received gratuitously formal notice from his attorney.

  While she waited for me to finish my degree, and though we didn’t need the money, Sara worked the day shift as a waitress at the faculty club. Later, in New Hampshire, she would work at a local stable, mucking stalls, grooming and exercising the horses, giving an occasional lesson, and at a wholesale greenhouse, tending to the plants. She said she enjoyed earning a wage, enjoyed this kind of work.