The Bradbury Report

by Steven Polansky

  “You’re not sure.”

  “I’ve never been there.”

  “I’ve never been there either,” he said.

  “I know. Let’s just go in. I want to talk to you.”

  “You want to talk to me about the girl?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Is she farther along?”

  “I think she is.”

  “I want to go farther along,” he said.

  “Give me a minute, Alan. I want to talk. Please come inside with me.”

  “All right,” he said. “A minute.”

  We sat down across from one another, by the window in one of the booths. Formica tables edged with aluminum, red leatherette seats and backs. The waitress, who’d been behind the counter talking to the two men, came over. She was middle-aged and looked tired. She was wearing a gray pinafore with a white collar. Pinned to her breast pocket was a white plastic nameplate with “Josie” printed on it. You were meant to know that wasn’t her real name, but part of the overall mock-up. Her hands were red and chapped.

  “Have you got any pie?” I said.

  “We’re picked pretty clean,” she said. She was more affable than I’d expected. “We’ve got a couple of pieces of apple, some cherry. There may be a piece of banana cream left.”

  “Do you want some pie?” I said to Alan. He looked at his reflection in the window and did not answer.

  “Give us two pieces of the apple pie,” I said.

  “You want ice cream on that?” she said. “Steamed cheese?”

  “You do steamed cheese?” I said.

  “Yeah. You want steamed cheese?”

  “We do,” I said. “And bring us two Cokes.”

  “Please,” Alan said.

  As the waitress went to put in our order, two couples came into the retro, their entrance presaged by an inrush of cold air. The men looked to be older than Alan, in their late twenties, early thirties; the girls with them were younger, eighteen or nineteen at most. Alan was sitting with his back to the door and couldn’t see them at first. The two men were dressed well, both wearing dark wool greatcoats, scarves, and leather gloves. The men were hatless, and their ears were bright red. The girls had on luminescent, neon-colored ski parkas with fur-trimmed hoods, thick wool mittens, and shin-high, fleece-lined boots. They had their hoods drawn tight, and I couldn’t see their faces. They made a lot of noise coming in, laughing, carrying on. Whatever they’d been doing, they’d had fun and more than a few drinks. One of the girls was clinging to the man she was paired with, her mouth on his neck. As they moved by us the cold air poured off them. They stopped just past our booth, standing over my shoulder, without once glancing at us, or otherwise acknowledging our presence. One of the girls put her mittened hand on my arm to steady herself. They took off their coats. Alan could see them now. The men were wearing business suits. The girls had on cocktail dresses, provocative flimsy things—their necks, shoulders, arms, legs left exposed—ludicrously wrong for the weather. The girls were pretty. They both immediately fluffed their hair. They sat down in the booth next to ours, at my back.

  I was sorry to see them. Their presence would make it all ways harder, if not impossible, for Alan to hear what I wanted to say.

  “Alan,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I want you to listen to me.”

  He was smiling. “I like them.”

  He spoke softly. In any case, they were paying no attention to us.

  “Because they’re pretty,” I said.

  “They are pretty.”

  “And silly.”

  “Why?” he said.

  “The way they act,” I said. “As if they don’t know any better.”

  He looked at me perplexed. He scratched the side of his head. I was saying things now I wasn’t sure I had any right to say, wasn’t sure I meant. “They should know better.”

  “Better than what?” he said.

  “This.”

  “They are young girls,” he said. This remark was descriptive, not by way of apology for them.

  “True.”

  “Are they cold?”

  “I’ll bet they are.”

  “I’ll bet they are,” he said. “Their arms.”

  “Alan. Will you listen to me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want you to know I’ve changed my mind.”

  “To what?”

  “I was wrong,” I said. “This is a bad idea.”

  “A bad idea to be here?”

  “No. Not to be here. This is fine. I’m happy to be here with you.”

  “I’m happy to be here.”

  “I’m glad. What I mean is, I was wrong. It was a bad idea to get you a girl.”

  “It was a good idea,” he said. “You were right.”

  “I was not right. I can tell you, Anna would not like it.”

  “I can tell you, I would like it.”

  “I don’t think you would,” I said. “Anyway, it’s wrong. It’s not the way it should happen.”

  Alan was keyed in to the sounds coming from the adjacent booth. I was grateful when he said, “What is the way?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You remember Anna said it will happen when it happens.” There could be no solace in this tautology—Anna hadn’t said exactly that—and he did not respond. “You will meet a girl. I can’t tell you when. You will. But for tonight, it’s not a good idea.”

  “It is a good idea,” he said.

  “It’s not. I should never have proposed it.”

  “It’s my idea,” he said.

  “I have to say no. I’m sorry. We can’t.”

  He thought for a moment, then looked away. He’d said what he was going to say, and so had I. Neither of us was in the least satisfied, though I was relieved to have it over. I was surprised he’d quit so easily. The waitress delivered our Cokes and pie. Alan ate his quickly, without looking up.

  The pie was delicious, as good as I remembered it.

  “How do you like the pie?” I said.

  “Fine, thank you,” he said.

  It was after one when we got back to the town house. I was exhausted from the walk and the cold. It had been a long day, and by the end of it I’d made a cruel mess of things. We went in quietly, but Anna was up. She was waiting for us, sitting in the near dark—there was a light in the kitchen—on the couch in the living room. She was in her robe, her feet bare. There was a cup of tea on the low glass table in front of her.

  “Hello,” I said. “I’m sorry you’re awake. We tried to be quiet. Shall I turn on a light?”

  “Please don’t,” she said.

  Alan sat down beside her on the couch. She leaned in towards him. She put her hand on the top of his head and kissed his cheek. “You’re up late, mister.”

  “I want to go to bed,” he said.

  “Go on then,” she said. “Brush your teeth.”

  “Good night,” he said to her.

  “Good night,” she said. “Sleep tight.”

  “Good night,” I said to Alan.

  He left the room.

  “Where were you guys?” Anna said, not threateningly.

  “We took a walk.” I was flooded with guilt. “Alan was restless, and we took a walk up Scarth Street a ways.”

  “I know that,” she said. She took the reader from the pocket of her robe. “I have to admit I was glad to have this thing. I would have been really worried.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “It was spur of the moment.”

  “You stopped for a while. Where were you?”

  “Are you angry with me?”

  “I’m curious,” she said. “Where’d you go?”

  “It was cold. We were hungry. I was hungry. We stopped at a retro.”

  “In the entertainment zone?”

  “Barely,” I said. “We had Cokes. I introduced Alan to apple pie with steamed cheese. I used to eat it with my father.�
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  “You let him have a Coke?”

  “I guess that was dumb.”

  “He’ll be up all night.”

  “I hope not,” I said. “Why are you awake?”

  “I got up,” she said. “I don’t know why. I looked in on Alan. He wasn’t there. I went to tell you, and you were gone. I was concerned. I got out the reader to see where you were. Then I waited for you.”

  “There was no need.”

  “As it turns out,” she said. “So you guys had a good time?”

  “I think we did. I hope so. All’s well that ends well.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I mean we had a good time.”

  “That’s good,” she said. “I’m happy to hear it.”

  The next night, after midnight, Anna woke me.

  “What?” I said.

  “You need to get up,” she said. “Alan’s gone.”

  “What do you mean?” Even half-asleep I knew exactly what she meant.

  “He’s up on Scarth Street again.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Not okay. You need to get out of bed. It’s snowing. It’s cold. We need to go get him. There’s no telling how he’s dressed. He took money from my purse. You need to show me where he is. So get up.”

  I got up. “Let me get my clothes on,” I said. “I’ll be ready to go in one minute. How much money did he take?”

  “A lot,” she said. “We need to bring him back before the group decides to get involved.”

  “Might they?”

  “He’s been out two nights in a row. Do you know where he is?”

  “I hope I do,” I said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I mean I know where he is if he’s where we were last night.”

  “Where else would he be?”

  “I don’t know. There’s a lot up there.”

  “Does he know that?”

  “I don’t know what he knows,” I said. “Is he moving around?”

  “No,” she said. “He’s stopped.”

  “Okay. Let me put my clothes on, and we’ll go get him.”

  “Just be quick,” she said.

  It was snowing heavily and colder than it had been the previous night. Anna walked fast, and I had trouble keeping up with her. I was afraid Alan had gone out on his own to find a brothel. I was more afraid he’d found one. If we were lucky, he’d be lost, wandering dazedly through some arcade or huddling in an alley. I considered telling Anna what I’d done, what I’d not done but planned to do, but there was a chance he had gone back to the retro, hoping to see the girls from the night before, and on that chance, I kept quiet.

  When we got to the retro I was comforted to see him through the window. He was sitting in a booth, the same one we’d had the night before, but he was on the opposite side, where I’d sat, facing the door. He didn’t see us standing outside. He was alone. Apart from him, the retro, what we could see of it, was empty. He was wearing his Jets cap. On the table in front of him was a Coke and a piece of some sort of pie, both apparently untouched.

  “There he is,” Anna said. “I see him.”

  She rapped on the window. Alan turned and looked out at her.

  “He’s all right,” she said.

  “Good.”

  She moved quickly towards the entrance. “Come on.”

  “You go,” I said.

  Eleven

  As I wrote in the previous chapter, I remember the Tall Man’s last visit in Regina—I suppose I could be brought to remember them all—in small part because it was the occasion on which Anna asked him for more money, but largely because it was right before we left for Calgary and thus at the end of what were for us, though they might not have seemed so then, relatively happy times. Right before my heart attack. Right before we told the clone what he was. I remember it was also shortly after the Tall Man had gone that Alan, for the first time, asked for money of his own.

  He told us he hadn’t liked having to take money from Anna’s purse; he knew what stealing was. Nor had he liked her response to his having taken it. All the boys he saw on the street—touchingly, he thought of himself as a boy, for which skewed sense of himself we were probably responsible—had their own money. “You have money,” he said to Anna. “When you want more money, you ask the Tall Man”—in fact, it was Alan who came up with this designation—“and he gives you it. Ray has money. Why don’t I have money?”

  “This is something we should talk about,” Anna said.

  In the course of his lessons, Anna had explained to Alan about money. It provided an excuse to work with him on math skills (supposedly my job), but also Anna thought he needed to know how to handle money. The math was not a problem for him—he was able to pay for his pie and Coke up on Scarth Street, and he was adept at making change—it was the concept of money as a medium of exchange, which, at its most fundamental, he found foreign. It made no sense to him that you could give something intrinsically worthless—a piece of paper, a small round of common metal—and get something of value in return.

  I listened to their conversations on the subject. I wanted to say to Alan, but didn’t, that the only thing worth getting, besides, say, food and shelter and medical care, you can buy with money is time. The truth is, in the years since Sara’s death, I have had a surfeit of discretionary, say even disposable, time to myself, and it has been a purgatory. I would have been happy to have had less time. I am not unhappy now, finally, to be running out of it.

  “This is something we should talk about,” Alan said.

  “What would you buy?” I said to Alan. “Please don’t say you’d buy a girl.”

  “I would buy a girl.”

  “I know you would,” I said.

  “You would not buy a girl,” Anna said. “We would not permit it.”

  “Not to keep, you know,” Alan said.

  “I know,” Anna said. “But no. Put it out of your mind.”

  “It is in my mind,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” Anna said.

  Alan mulled over his next move. “If you give me money,” he said to both of us, “I will buy a computer.” (His first “If . . . then” construction. He’d certainly understood causation before this, but now he’d acquired its rhetoric.) “I want a computer.” He knew what a computer was, knew everyone had a computer, but it was certain he had no idea what he could or would do with one.

  “Computers cost a lot of money,” Anna said.

  “Ray has a lot of money,” he said. Then, to me: “If you give me your money, Ray, I will buy a computer. And I will buy a whistle.”

  “A whistle?”

  “Yes. I will buy a referee’s whistle, a silver whistle, and I will blow it.”

  “I will buy you a whistle,” I said.

  (I did buy him a whistle, at a sports shop before we left Regina. It came with a lanyard. He wore the whistle around his neck and blew it at odd moments, only in the house. He blew it once when Anna was slow to bring him his dinner, but she quickly put a stop to that.)

  If we would not give him money, then he would get a job, he said. He knew what a job was, understood the concept of work for pay. We believed he’d worked much of his life, though whatever he did inside the Clearances—he would not speak of it—he did for no pay. Anna had bought a book called When I Grow Up. It was a primer on jobs. It described, with celebratory illustrations—every job equally worthy and appealing, salary never mentioned—a wide range of occupations, and grouped them alphabetically, multiple jobs listed under all the letters but X (only X-Ray Technician). Over several weeks, as a part of their work together, Anna read through the book with him, taking her time, a letter or two a day. For a few days, in the middle of this process, Alan declared he wanted to be a journalist, his decision based entirely—the book was outdated—on a colored drawing of a handsome, well-dressed man standing in front of a camera holding a microphone. Under Z there were, as you’d predict, Zoologist and Zookeeper.
At the head of the Zs, the book’s climax, was Zamboni Driver, and Alan was decided.

  “You have a job,” Anna told him. At the time I thought this could have been a risky way to take the conversation.

  “I don’t have a job,” he said.

  “You do,” Anna said. “Your job is to learn.”

  “That’s not a job,” he said.

  “It is. It’s an important job.”

  “Then give me money,” he said.

  “It’s not that kind of job,” I said, trying to be helpful.

  “What kind of job is it?” he said.

  “It’s the kind of job you do but don’t get money for.”

  “That’s not a job,” he said.

  “It’s your work,” I said.

  “My work is teaching you,” Anna said.

  “Is that your job?” he asked her.

  “It’s not really a job,” she said. “It’s my work. It was my job.”

  “What was your job?” he said.

  “I was a teacher.”

  “You were a teacher?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Did they give you money? The people you teached?”

  “The people I taught,” she said.

  “Did they give you money?”

  “No,” Anna said. “The children I taught did not give me money. The school paid me. Ray was a teacher, too.”

  “You were a teacher?” he said to me.

  “I was.”

  He waited for me to finish my sentence, then prompted: “A teacher.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did the school pay you, too?”

  “They did pay me,” I said. “I’m retired now.”

  “What did you say?” he said, though always when he said this he meant, “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t teach anymore,” I said. “I’ve stopped.”

  “You’ve stopped?” he said.

  “Yes. Anna’s retired, too,” I said.

  “She’s stopped?”

  “Yes.”

  “You teach me,” he said to Anna.

  “I do teach you,” she said. “But it’s not a job.”

  “He gives you money,” Alan said.

  “Who does?”

  “The Tall Man.”

  “He gives me money so we can live. So we can buy food.”

  “You don’t have a job,” he said, “and the Tall Man gives you money. Ray doesn’t have a job. He has money. He has a lot of money. I want money.”