“Then you must stop. Right now. No more of that.”
“How do you say it?” He included me in this question.
“I don’t say it,” I said.
“That’s a very good question,” she said to him, making it clear she’d not found my response productive. “Someday, maybe it will be soon, you will meet a girl.” I believe this was something she’d planned to say as the happy end of her disquisition. “You will get to know her. You will like her, and she will like you. If you’re kind and gentle and considerate, which I know you will be, and if you’re lucky, she will love you. You are always lucky to be loved. If you love her, and if, after a time, she wants to do what you want to do, then you will do it. What the two of you will do will be something fine and good and sweet. When we talk about that, we say ‘making love.’ ”
“Which is not what you’ve seen on TV,” I said.
Alan paid no attention to me. You could see him trying to make sense of what Anna had said. By this time Alan had more than a nominal understanding of what love was—I believe, in his way, he loved Anna—but the idea of making it appeared to stump him.
Finally, in frustration—it was cumulative—he said, “I want a girl to fuck.” This was so heartfelt as to be inoffensive. “Why can’t I have one?”
Anna softened even further. “You will have one,” she said. “Someday you will. I promise. And no more of that language. Okay?”
“Yes,” he said.
Anna set out the arguments, moral and political, against pornography, a term Alan hadn’t heard before, and one she didn’t insist he acquire. The arguments were familiar—the objectification, the dehumanization of women, the promotion of violence against them, the devaluation of sex, of physical and emotional intimacy, the suffering and sadness all around, etc. In her brief, Anna took pains to use language that was simple and clear. I found the arguments none the less compelling for their familiarity and simplicity. I can’t say how Alan found them, though, as I’ve said, they certainly, and immediately, had the desired effect. What surprised and impressed me most was that Anna was willing to talk to Alan about, citing him as an example, her first boyfriend, the one she’d met in college, a psychopath and pornography addict, named Wilf. Without going into detail, she spoke about his cruel treatment of her, but also, with some charity, about the great waste and tragedy of his life. (The next time we were alone, I asked her if she knew what had happened to Wilf after college. She said she didn’t know, and didn’t want to know.)
When it was clear that Anna had said all she felt she needed to say on the subject, I said, “That was good. You did that well.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I hope so. I’m not sure.”
“No,” I said. “That was very skillful.”
“Did I make any sense?”
“I think you did. Perfect sense.”
“What do you think?” she asked Alan. “Is there anything you don’t understand? Do you have any questions?”
Alan was hard to read. He had listened patiently and attentively, I thought, but he sat there largely without affect.
“Did you understand what I was saying?” Anna said
“Yes,” he said. He might have. Then, looking straight at Anna, he said, “They like it.”
“Who does?” she said.
“The girls. They like making love.”
“How can you say that?” she said.
“They smile,” he said. “They all smile.”
Before we left Ottawa for Winnipeg—the drive was long, and we spent a night in a Thunder Bay motel—the Tall Man took our green Chinese car, which was a piece of junk that, in our care, had gotten junkier, and, in its stead, gave us a relatively new and spruce Tagore van. At the end of our stay in Winnipeg, the van, which we hated to lose, was replaced by an Oldsmobile Redux, a ponderous old sedan. We were in the Redux, on the way from Winnipeg to Regina. Anna was driving, and Alan was asleep in the backseat. It was the beginning of March and still very cold. A sunny, dry day, but the roads were dusted with snow blowing off the fields, the air glittery. In the interests of furthering my education, and passing the time, Anna was talking about what might have happened—was, she said, about to happen—had the government not taken cloning out of the hands of the corporate practitioners: the cloning process commercialized; cloned children commoditized, for sale.
“Take this hypothetical case,” she said, “which would not have been hypothetical for long. An infertile couple, decent, civilized folks, who, after trying unsuccessfully a number of other possible solutions, want to clone a child. They are sad, frustrated, desperate. It is impossible not to sympathize with them.”
“Not impossible,” I said.
“All right,” she said. “Fine. They go to a doctor who specializes in cloning. When they take this step, it is no longer extreme or outside the law. They are acquainted with several couples who have done it, though for our couple—let’s give them this—it is a last resort. The doctor listens to their story. He has heard it many times before. He invites them to consider cloning a child from a donor cell that is unrelated to either of them, or to anyone in their immediate family.”
“In their case,” I said, “presumably an improvement.”
“You’re joking, but that’s exactly the point,” she said. “Anyway. The couple has considered this. The doctor suggests that a child of their own choosing might well be preferable to a child of their own. They are open to this suggestion.”
“Why?”
“Why not?” Anna said. “Since it was now possible, and safe, why would they not choose to have a baby better, more perfect, than any, even with all the luck in the world, they could make on their own? That the doctor would make this same argument to a couple who were not infertile does not occur to our guys. Why should it? They can’t think of a reason why they would not choose a better baby. They like the idea of a better baby. The idea of it brings them relief, and makes them feel proud.”
“It would not be theirs,” I said.
“That’s one way of looking at it. She would carry it. Deliver it. Nurse it. They would raise it. They would love it.”
“Still.”
“Still,” she said. “So the doctor shows them a catalog of donor cells he has available for purchase. There are donor bios they can read and color mug shots they can look at. The clinic has tissue samples of each available child in its deep freeze. Our couple is given a price list. They choose the best baby available, or the best baby they can afford. Let’s say they are wealthy, that money is no object, and let’s say that for them beauty is the prime virtue. So they choose to clone, to buy, as their child, Clarissa Harlowe.”
“Clarissa Harlowe?”
“Whatever you want to say about her acting, she was generally held to be the most beautiful woman of her generation.”
“She was a heroin addict,” I said.
“Makes no difference. So let’s say we really like this couple and want them to be happy. Let’s say we think they deserve happiness.”
“She was decapitated.”
“It doesn’t matter. She was beautiful. They want a daughter, and, above all else, they want their daughter to be beautiful.”
“They want her to be Clarissa Harlowe?”
“They do” she said, “and they believe that because they will bring her up, she will be their Clarissa Harlowe. Now suppose everyone, or even, say, one percent of those who wanted a beautiful daughter—this, too, would have been possible—chose to clone Clarissa Harlowe.”
“You’re exaggerating for effect,” I said.
“I’m not,” she said. “But, beyond the ungodly circumstance of there being, at any one time, thousands of Clarissa Harlowes, young and old, preening around the country, hundreds in the same city, dozens in the same town, and the not inconceivable event of two or more of these beauties bumping into one another—what happens to our notions of beauty? of talent? of individuality? of the self?—the point is that in the way cloners exert control over the cloned, cloni
ng is despotic. To take just this example, cloning gives us an unnatural opportunity to have our way, to work our wills on the identity of our children. The enlightened notion that all children, no matter who they are, should be wanted children would, with the possibility of cloning, inevitably mutate into the belief that only those children who fulfill our wants, our needs, would be worth having.”
Here’s what I was thinking, somewhat off the point, in the passenger seat of the Redux: if Alan were my son, that is, if he were a clone of my dead son grown into a man, and I’d had him made to replace the son I’d lost, I’d miss him, my lost son, all the more.
When we’d been in Regina several weeks and had settled in to our town house on St. John Street—after six months at very close quarters, Alan and I were thankful each to have his own bedroom—I got it into my head that, some night after Anna was asleep, very much on the sly, I would take Alan to a brothel.
I felt sorry for the boy. He’d been eager to placate Anna and had done as she’d asked: since his talking to in Winnipeg, he’d watched no pornography and, so far as I knew, and perhaps prematurely, he’d quit masturbating. In his work with Anna, he’d made geometric progress. (When the Tall Man came on his monthly visits, Alan still refused to do anything but sit silent on the couch.) Anna had recently begun reading Great Expectations with him. With her help he was able to withstand the language and keep pace with the plot, and seemed to enjoy the book. (Anna told me he found the novel’s more realistic portraits—Pip, for instance, Joe and Mrs. Joe, Estella—no less fictive or fantastic than its out-and-out grotesques.) He was still somewhat slow of speech—his speech showed signs of echolalia—and self-conscious about it, but when he relaxed and got going, when he was in the mood to talk, he was thoughtful and clear and even at times simply eloquent. Except when he was upset, or frightened, he was reasonably poised and self-contained. There was nothing about his behavior readily apparent to distinguish him from most other sensible young men his age, and he could be counted on to behave well with us in private, and—he had not yet been by himself—with us in public. He’d worked hard to make himself passable, I hesitate to say it, normal. There was something sad about his diligence: no one, really, to appreciate the effort and the results but Anna and I, and our responses were not the ones he was interested in. Virtual sequestration, along with a broad-based abstemiousness and chastity of all sorts, had been my chosen state going on forty years. But Alan, who’d spent all but the last seven months of his life as a clone living with other clones in captivity (you supply the joke about the American polity), was young and virile and, suddenly, desperately heterosexual. If there was something, and there was, Miss Havisham-like about my life since Sara’s death (to my credit, I’d exacted revenge on no one but myself), Alan had been given no choice but to live, living with us, the life of Rapunzel. In my opinion he needed, now that he knew what one was, and had seen what they could do and have done to them, needed before very much longer, a girl. A girl, such was my thinking, who knew her craft, who would treat him well, and with whom he would be safe.
I’d never been to a brothel. That I knew of, I’d never seen a prostitute and suspect I wouldn’t recognize one if she stepped up and licked my ear. On the rare and random instances when it had crossed my mind, the thought of seeking comfort in a brothel elicited only guilt and terror and disgust. But there I was, planning to act as pander, and ready to pay Alan’s way. In Regina, the legal brothels, female and male, are confined, one hard upon the other, to a small subdistrict unofficially called “the Purg,” which comprises two blocks of a larger entertainment zone, with betting parlors, electronic cafés, espresso bars, pot joints, retros, amusement arcades, multiscreen digital theaters, a VR Disney World for the kids, and the Globe, Regina’s one legitimate theater. I knew where it was, the Purg, up Scarth Street no more than half a mile from our town house. We’d passed through it several times during the day—soon after our arrival in Regina, we’d taken Alan to a movie, some deafening, frantic science fiction thing he didn’t like, and which we didn’t see through to the end—when there was nothing, no lights, no customers, no girls, to signal its function.
Alan and I were sitting in the living room, watching an informational program about the drought in the Northwest Territories attributable to a severe shortfall of snow there the past few winters. I was on the loveseat, Alan in a small club chair, his stocking feet up on an ottoman. It was after eleven o’clock, a weeknight in mid-March, still very much winter in Regina. Anna had gone to bed early. We were both bored by the show. Alan was restless.
“I have an idea,” I said. “Might we turn off the TV?”
“I don’t care if you turn it off,” he said.
“If you’re interested, I won’t.”
“Well, I’m not interested,” he said.
“Anyway,” I said, “I have an idea.”
“What is your idea?”
“What if we took a walk? You and I? How does that sound?”
“How does that sound to me?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I don’t know how that sounds,” he said. “Would she come with us?” With Alan, “she” always meant Anna.
“She’s in her bed,” I said. “We’ll let her sleep. She’s tired.”
“She is tired,” he said. This reads as if it might have been combative, but it was not. “Are you tired?”
“I’m not,” I said. “Which is why I want to take a walk.”
“With me?”
“Yes.”
“Not with Anna?”
“No. With you. If you want to. Do you want to?”
“I don’t know if I want to,” he said. “Is she fast asleep?”
“I think she is,” I said.
“Is it bedtime?”
“Well, yes. It is bedtime. So we can go to bed. If you’re tired. If you’re not tired, we can take a walk. If you want to.”
“I don’t know if I want to. You and I?”
“Yes,” I said. “The two of us.”
“The two of us never walked before.”
“That’s true. We haven’t.”
“It’s dark.”
“It is dark.” It was hard for me not to fall into his pattern. Anna had no trouble resisting.
“It’s cold.”
“Listen, Alan, we don’t have to go.”
“All right,” he said.
“Does that mean you don’t want to go?”
“It doesn’t mean I don’t want to go,” he said. “Where will we go?”
“Well, I have an idea about that.”
“What is your idea?” he said, and we were back where we started, which often happened when I talked with him.
“What would you say if we took a walk to a place where you could be with a girl?”
“I would say I would like to be with a girl,” he said.
“I know you would.”
“You know I would. What kind of girl?”
“A pretty girl.”
“I would like her. What’s her name?”
“I don’t know her yet,” I said.
“I don’t know her either,” he said.
“We’ll meet her, and then she’ll tell you her name.”
“When will I meet her?”
“When we get where we’re going,” I said.
“Where are we going?”
“We’re going to a place where there will be a girl for you.”
“A pretty girl,” he said.
“That’s right.”
“For me.”
The night was cold—Alan insisted on wearing his Jets cap—but there was little wind, and the air was clear and dry. By the time we started our walk it was midnight. Not accustomed to being out so late, to being out at any time unaccompanied by Anna, Alan was edgy and stayed close by my side, though not close enough that our bodies might touch. Near the town house the streets were quiet, which helped calm him. We’d walked about a quarter of a mile with not a word spoken between us,
the lights of the Scarth Street entertainment zone, within it the Purg, just visible ahead, when I was given a rare moment of clear-headedness, in which I saw, with absolute certainty, the idea of taking Alan to a brothel was, in the real world, a bad one, that acting on it would be utterly inappropriate and irresponsible, and that the consequences of our proceeding as planned would be, for all of us, very sad. Alan might experience some ephemeral sexual satisfaction, but the price paid would be high: disillusionment, several kinds of sadness, embarrassment, disorientation. (He did not know enough for self-loathing.) If he wanted more, he’d be a long time getting it, so there’d be frustration and anger, and a good chance he’d revert, now with greater urgency, to pornography. There’s no telling what the effect would be on his feelings about women in general, or on his feelings about Anna, the way he treated her. Anna would be angry and hurt. She’d rightly blame me—she’d be furious—and whatever trust had accrued between us would be breached irreparably. That my motives had included no self-interest (nor an ounce of wisdom or sense) would get me no leniency. She’d want to throw me out, make sure somehow I’d have nothing more to do with Alan. Alan would, in all the important ways, be innocent, of course, but would she be able to forgive him his betrayal—I believed that’s how she’d read it—his transgression, when it came down to it, his desire?
We had come to an all-night retro at the edge of the entertainment zone. We could see two men sitting inside at the counter. From where we stood, the booths along the front window appeared empty.
“Let’s duck in here for a minute,” I said.
“Is the girl in there?” Alan said.
“No,” I said.
“Has she left for a minute?”
“No, Alan. I’m afraid this is not the place with the girl.”
“I’m afraid I don’t want to go in it.”
“Just for a minute. We’ll get warm. We’ll have a snack.” I tried to make it sound exotic. “A late-night snack.”
“No, thank you. I don’t want a snack. Where is the place?”
“It’s farther along. I’m not sure where it is.”
The Bradbury Report Page 25