The Bradbury Report

by Steven Polansky

  “I don’t think anything,” I said. “I’m sure it’s not.”

  “I don’t think it is,” she said. “I think my ability to cope with his loss, to incorporate it into a workable, purposeful life, does him honor.”

  “Probably so,” I said.

  “I mean, I was inconsolable at first. I was crippled with grief. People say this, but in my case it was true.” She smiled. “I know people say that, too. The day after he died, when I came out of shock, I stood in the middle of my kitchen, threw my head back, and I wailed. A noise came out of my throat I had never heard before and wouldn’t have believed I was capable of making. It felt exactly like my body was trying to turn itself inside out. We had been together nearly forty years. I could see no way of going on without him. I believed I would not go on. Do you know this feeling?”

  “Something like it,” I said.

  “It so damaged my voice I could barely speak, but it seemed to bring me relief, to make such an ungodly racket. By the third day, I’d got myself under control and reasonably composed. My kids were a comfort. I was embarrassed by my behavior. And it’s true, you have no real choice but to go on.”

  “I’ve heard that,” I said.

  “At least when you’ve lived such a sweet and privileged life as I have. I told myself there were still things to do. Though I have to say I had no idea what would soon be asked of me.

  “Up until the time he died,” she said, “my husband was the manager of the town’s baseball team. He’d been gearing up for spring practice. All his present players and many of his former players were at the memorial service, with their families. He had coached the fathers and their sons. I can think of no one who didn’t like him. He had a few good friends, men he had known since grade school. But there were many more, most of whom I knew, who had relied on him. I was moved by their affection for him.”

  “He sounds like a wonderful man,” I said.

  “He died of complications resulting from near-total renal failure. I haven’t told you this. He was somewhere between six-foot-three and six-foot-four, and, when he was not careful, he could weigh upwards of three hundred and fifty pounds. I tried to help him eat smartly, but I wasn’t forceful or fastidious enough. His weight had always been a problem. All the men on his father’s side were big. By the time he was fifty, he was Type 2 diabetic. It didn’t slow him down one whit. He was tireless. We monitored his blood sugar, and he took his medicine most of the time, when he remembered to. Then his kidneys failed. There are strict limits to how long they’ll let you stay on dialysis. Do you know this?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Three or four days, at most. Just enough time to harvest and transport the replacement kidneys. But we would not have been able to afford the treatment, even for so short a time. We’d both refused to participate in the government’s replication program, and the medical insurance we were able to get covered only the most minimal and routine of services. When he was taken to the hospital, the first question the doctor asked him was if he’d had a copy made. Because there was no copy, he was simply not eligible for a transplant, no matter how many serviceable kidneys might have been obtainable.”

  “That’s hard to believe,” I said.

  “It’s absolutely true,” she said. “Insult to injury, he had a life insurance policy for one million dollars, which the insurance company refused to pay out. They claimed his death was preventable, that by choosing not to be cloned, he had voluntarily chosen not to avail himself of the appropriate and necessary treatment. We’d begun to make plans to go to Canada, to Winnipeg, where, if they could find a suitable kidney, they would do the procedure. He was dead before we’d completed the arrangements. He died quickly, which was a mercy.

  “He was very brave,” she said. “I’d say he was heroic. He wanted it clear he would rather die than in any way benefit from a practice he found so abhorrent.”

  We were the next car to be inspected.

  “Have we got anything to worry about here?” I said.

  “Through customs?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like what?” she said.

  “I have no idea,” I said. “Are we illegal?”

  “Not yet,” she said.

  I did not mention the sixty thousand dollars I had stuffed in boot socks in my bag. There was nothing criminal about this, but had the customs officials discovered that much cash, stashed like that, it would certainly have necessitated an explanation. In the event, we were not asked to open our bags.

  “Here’s what I want to tell you,” she said.

  “Be quick,” I said. “We’re next.”

  Anna would not be rushed. “My husband had been dead no more than two weeks when I began to think in surprising and troubling ways. I began to wonder about the choice we’d made. I knew there was no question he would still be alive and with me, with his children, with his friends, looking forward to grandchildren and a longer life, if there’d been a clone. Even at my weakest, my most uncertain, I had no real doubt we’d made the ethical choice. But I questioned the depth of my own conviction. I wondered if I would, or could, make the same choice again, now, facing the rest of my life without him.”

  It began to sound like something she had planned to say.

  “I had thoughts stranger and more disturbing than this,” she said. “At the very point when the government stepped in and preemptively took control of cloning, outlawing it in the private sector, the biotech companies were ready to make available to individuals a whole array of cloning possibilities. These included the cloning of the dead. If the cloning industry had been allowed to proceed as it had planned, it would then have been relatively easy, though expensive, to purchase a copy of a deceased parent, or child, or spouse, or friend. For that matter, if the cellular material, and the rights to it, were available, you could buy a copy of anyone you could think of, dead or alive. After my husband died, I wondered what would it be like if it were now legal to clone the dead? Would I want to see my husband alive again, as an infant? Would I want to raise him as my son? When he was thirteen, I would be eighty. What would it be like to be so old myself and see him so young? I know enough to know his clone would not be my husband. And it would certainly not be my son. But I wasn’t sure how I would answer these questions if they were more than hypothetical.”

  An official waved us forward. We did not move. The car behind us sounded its horn.

  “Of this I am sure,” she said. “I am grateful this grotesque, incestuous version of resurrection is no longer a possibility.”

  Anna put the truck in gear and pulled forward. She’d told me what she wanted to tell me. Then she said, in an offhanded way, meaning to change the subject, “You’d figure there must be a black market somewhere for this sort of ghoulishness, but I’m not aware of it.”

  Eight

  More and more, I have begun to feel I am running out of time. There is, for one, my heart. Should there be another incident, of any moment, I will assuredly die before help reaches me. For another, there is the government, what Anna calls, without a hint of levity, the Dolly Squad. It has been more than a year since Anna and I crossed into Canada and received the clone. If her group can be believed, the Dolly Squad was after Anna even before we got to Winnipeg. And there is no question that, by now, the government will have had to investigate the possibility that I was involved in the disappearance of the clone. Finding me not at home, my absence inexplicable, my whereabouts unknown, they will have begun—long since, perhaps—to track me as well. It is who I am, what I know, what I have seen, what I might say. If the government knew about my report, it would be simply another reason for them to want me dead.

  What happens to this report if they find me, or my heart gives out, before I’ve finished it? I am confident my report will, in the end, be far from what Anna’s group hoped it would be. I take pleasure and satisfaction in that prospect. I’m not sure I want them to have it, though, having written as much of it as I have—and not for that reas
on only—I would be sad to think I won’t finish it or, should I finish, that it will not find a sympathetic readership.

  Our time in Montreal—we spent three nights and all or part of four days there, arriving Friday afternoon, leaving for Ottawa Monday noon—was a sweet, happy, easy time. Innocent. Idyllic. Even, I am in the frame of mind to say, Edenic. A time just before my hitherto nondescript life lapsed suddenly into meaning and menace.

  We were both untethered and fearful. I had no idea what to expect; Anna was only slightly less unsure, though, constitutionally, much braver. In Montreal, we shared one hotel room—we registered as man and wife—and it was awkward. My health was a problem. Anna was eager to walk all over the city. I was still weak and quickly tired. Walking any distance, particularly uphill, was hard for me. I went back to the hotel room each afternoon for a nap, because I needed one, and also to give Anna the liberty to walk out at her own speed. She wanted to eat at exotic restaurants; I had to be careful what I ate. She missed her children desperately.

  Still, I remember our brief stay in Montreal as one last good, uncomplicated time before we took charge of the clone, a time when, no matter how anxious I was to meet him, the clone—his life, his needs, his significance—remained almost entirely theoretical. The weather was perfect: sunny and breezy and cooler than it had been down in New Hampshire. Our time was our own, and we had lots of money to spend. In addition to the subsidy we’d be given by Anna’s group, we had my stash.

  On the border, on the eastern shore of Lake Champlain, the Canadian customs official who processed us was cheerful and efficient. We presented our driver’s licenses. The official asked the purpose of our trip, and Anna said, “Pleasure.” The day was clear and bright. The station was not busy. We were an elderly couple, on vacation. That’s how he took us, whatever our last names, however far apart we lived when we were at home. He asked, somewhat perfunctorily, if we were bringing any food or plants into the country. He did not check our bags, which were in full view, or ask us to get out of the truck, which he expressly admired. He made some notes, handed back our licenses, wished us a safe trip in English and French, and sent us on our way. We were through in no more than ten minutes.

  We drove north on Route 133 towards Montreal. We’d gone fewer than twenty miles, when, just before a town called Sabevois, the green car came up behind us and sounded its horn once.

  “The green car,” I said to Anna.

  “I’ve been watching it,” she said.

  “They want us to pull over.” There were two men in the car, the driver motioning us to the shoulder. “What do we do?”

  “We pull over,” she said.

  “Are you sure?” I said.

  “What do you have in mind?”

  It was clear I had nothing in mind.

  “I was mistaken,” she said, looking in the rearview mirror. “I do recognize one of them.”

  “Is that good or bad?” I said. “For us.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Stop fretting.”

  Anna pulled off the road. The green car stopped on the shoulder, right behind us.

  “Why don’t we get out?” Anna said.

  We got out of the truck. On both sides of the road, where we were, there were fields. A hundred yards ahead was a white clapboard farmhouse set back from the road. Running alongside the house a windbreak, a line of tall evergreens. Otherwise, there was nothing within view. The traffic passing in either direction was light. As they came upon us, a few of the northbound cars slowed to see what might be going on.

  The two men in the green car got out and walked our way. I recognized the taller of the two men from Anna’s journal. (She should be writing this report.) The other man, a black man, had not appeared in the journal. He, too, was tall, and thin, but—there was no reason to expect otherwise—his head and hands were normal size. The four of us stood by Anna’s truck, on the side away from the road. The man with the scary hands—they were scary—looked at me. He did not speak. What was it like for him to look at me? Except for Anna, he was the one person who had seen the clone and also, now, his original. It would have been disquieting for him to see, in such swift and stark relief, the effects of age—the abrupt passage of a man from undiminished youth (however narcotized and helpless) to the penultimate stages of disintegration—the skull just beneath the skin. All very gothic, a convention of nitwitted horror films, yet, in this case, my case, real and no doubt shocking.

  He spoke first, to Anna.

  “Here you are,” he said.

  “And you, as well,” she said.

  “How was your trip?”

  “Not bad,” she said. “Yours?”

  “Trying.”

  “Well, it’s beautiful today.”

  “It is,” he said. “It’s beautiful here. Have you been into Canada before?”

  “Once,” she said.

  “In Quebec?” he said. “Dans cet endroit même?”

  “No,” she said.

  He did not introduce the black man, who, in any case, kept his focus on the road.

  I looked over at the green car. There was no one in the backseat. Did they have the clone in the trunk?

  “Shall we have some more conversation?” He spoke only to Anna. “Before we get down to business?”

  “Not on my account,” she said.

  “You don’t feel friendly towards me.”

  “I don’t,” she said. “You’re right.”

  “People generally don’t,” he said. He smiled. “Something to do with my appearance.”

  “Not at all,” she said.

  “No. I accept it,” he said. “But there are a few things we must do. And we are on the same side.”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “I’m not sure I know what side I’m on.”

  “I knew your husband,” he said. “I mean you no harm.”

  “What things must we do?” Anna said. “Why don’t we just do them?”

  “All right. Now we swap cars.”

  “Here?” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “You’ll go on to Montreal in the car. We’ll drive your truck back to Iowa. We’ll leave it parked in your driveway. For a while at least, it will appear you are home.”

  “Where is the clone?” I said.

  “The paperwork for the car,” he said to Anna, “title and registration and insurance, is in the glove box.”

  “In whose name?” she said.

  “Your new one,” he said.

  The black man handed him a manila envelope, which he gave to Anna. “A new passport for you, and a new driver’s license.”

  “What about him?” she said. She meant me. I have to admit, the way she said it felt, at that moment, gratuitously impersonal.

  “Tomorrow morning at eleven,” he said, “take him to Centaur Office Supplies on the Rue de la Montagne. Will you remember that? Or shall I write it down?”

  “Remember that, will you?” Anna said to me. She was teasing now, wanting to salve my feelings, which she had, in fact, hurt.

  “They’re expecting you,” he said. “They’ll take his picture. We’ll make him a new passport and driver’s license. You’ll have it before you leave Montreal.”

  “I have a driver’s license,” I said. “I won’t give up my driver’s license.”

  “No one’s asking you to,” the man said, speaking to me for the first time. “Just use the new one.” To Anna, he said: “We have the money you’ll need for your time in Canada.” The black man handed him another, smaller, manila envelope. He gave it to Anna. “Wait until you’re back on the road to count it. Please be frugal. If you need more, we’ll try to provide it.”

  “How much is there?” I said.

  Again, to Anna: “You should have enough.”

  “Tell them to keep their money,” I said to Anna. Then, to him: “Keep your money.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Anna said.

  “We don’t need it,” I said.

  “Of course we do,”
she said.

  “In Montreal,” he said, “you’ll stay in the Hotel Bonsecours on the Rue St.-Paul. Pay with cash. There’s a street map of Montreal in the envelope with your passport and driver’s license. I’ve written the name of the hotel and circled its location. Park the car in their garage. We’ve reserved a room for you, under your new name. You’ll register as man and wife.”

  “That’s no good,” Anna said.

  “I agree,” I said.

  “It will be only a short stay. We’ll send word to you there about where you go next.”

  “What do we do until then?” I said.

  “That’s up to you,” he said to me. “If I were you, I’d calm down and try, while I could, to enjoy myself. You’ve a long way to go. It will be difficult.”

  “That’s hardly reassuring,” I said.

  He laughed. He put his big hand, palm down, on top of my head. “So are you,” he said. “Hardly reassuring.”

  We were in the green car. I was driving. Anna had opposed my taking over, but I told her I wouldn’t get in the car unless she consented. We’d gone not much more than a mile when she said, with some urgency, “Slow down.”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “Please, Ray,” she said. “You’re going way too fast.” She put her hand on my right knee, to let me know she was serious and, by her touch, to coax me to ease up on the pedal.

  “I’m angry,” I said. I slowed down.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “I was going too fast.”

  “You were. You’re a bit of a kook. You know that?”

  “I’m really not,” I said. “I’ve never been a kook. Not at all.”

  “Well, take it easy,” she said.

  I took a breath. “I will. I’ll take it easy.”

  “All right. Hotshot.” She patted my knee, then took her hand away. “There’s no rush.”