“I am so sorry, Ray.” She touched the back of my right hand, careful not to disturb the intravenous drip. “Three months he told me.”
“At the outside. What did you think of him?”
“The doctor?”
“Arrogant jerk,” I said.
Anna smiled. “You have trouble with men.”
I thought about this. “Maybe I do.”
“Have you always?”
“Maybe I have,” I said. “Was Alan around when he spoke with you?”
“On the margins. I don’t know what he heard.”
A nurse I did not recognize came into the room. She spoke to Anna. “Mrs. Grey, your son is asking for you.”
“Is he all right?” I said.
“Appears to be,” the nurse said. “He asked me to get his mother. I told him it was okay if he came in, but he didn’t want to.”
“I’d better go,” Anna said.
“Will you be back?” I said.
“Yes. Let me just see what he needs.”
Anna was back within minutes.
“He wanted to tell me a joke,” she said.
“A joke?”
“His first one,” she said.
“Momentous,” I said.
“It is,” she said. “Something about two men and a duck. I didn’t follow it. He thinks it’s very funny. Requires quacking.”
“Did he make it up?”
“I have no idea where he got it.”
“How long do we have?”
“A few minutes,” she said. “He’s nervous, Ray. He told me the joke. Then he asked me how you looked.”
“How do I look?”
“You look terrible.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him you looked good. Like yourself.”
“Half the truth.”
Anna unzipped the duffle bag and began unpacking it.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“I’m putting your stuff away. So you’ll have it.”
“Stop,” I said. “Sit here.”
“I don’t want to,” she said. “I don’t want to sit.”
“Please.”
She stopped unpacking, but did not sit. “What will you do, Ray?”
“About what?”
“About the transplant?”
“Are you asking me this question?”
“Yes,” she said.
“You can’t want me to do it.”
“I don’t know what I want,” she said. She took a deep breath, then spoke, flatly, ticking off her wants as if she were ordering a meal. “I don’t want to lose you. I know that. I want to keep the three of us together. I want to see my children again. My grandchildren.”
“There’s no way all of that can happen,” I said. “You can’t have all these things.”
“I can’t have any.” This, too, said matter-of-factly.
“You’ll see your children again.”
“You think so?”
“That would be too great a price to pay.”
“I was willing to pay it,” she said.
I didn’t know how to respond.
“Just consider it,” she said.
“You can’t mean this, Anna.”
“I do.”
“You can’t. I can’t take a heart. How could I do that?”
“You could. They’ve got plenty of hearts. They wouldn’t have to kill a clone.”
“You don’t know that. You, of all people, don’t need me to say this. However it goes, the heart would come from a clone.”
“Someone else’s.” She was angry. “I don’t care, Ray. I swear to you I don’t.”
“You do care. Of course you do.”
She was quiet.
“That’s not the whole of it, anyway,” I said. “The truth is, Anna, three months sounds like just about enough.”
I could see this hurt her, and I was sorry.
“What do we tell him?” she said on her way out. “I’m not sure he can handle any more hard news.”
When Anna next visited me Alan came with her into the room. They showed up first thing in the morning. Though it was warm out, Alan was wearing his Winnipeg Jets jersey. He was nervous. He stood by the door and did whatever he could to avoid looking at me.
“I’m glad to see you,” I said to him. I was glad. “You look sharp. I like your jersey.”
“Don’t say jersey,” he said. “Say sweater.”
If Alan was a citizen of any country, it was Canada.
“I like your sweater. So, are you coming in?”
“I am coming in,” he said. “You got it for me. Do you remember that?”
“I do remember. That was a good night.”
“How are you feeling?” Anna said.
“Good. Raring to go.”
“What did you say?” Alan was in the room now, standing beside Anna, though still not quite looking at me.
“I’m eager to go.”
Alan stated the obvious. “You are not feeling good. You are not raring.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not exactly raring. I’m tired. But I want to go home.” To Anna: “Maybe tomorrow.”
“Good,” she said. “We’ll be ready.”
“Anna says you will be all right,” Alan said. “They will give you a new heart, and then you will be all right.”
“I hope that’s true,” I said.
“It’s true,” Anna said to Alan. Then, to me: “Of course it’s true.”
There was a TV bracketed to the wall opposite the bed. Alan looked up at it. “The TV’s not on,” he said.
“Turn it on if you want to,” I said.
“I don’t want to,” he said. “I don’t want to watch it.”
“There’s some Jell-O here I didn’t eat. Would you like that?”
“No,” he said. “What is Jell-O?”
I was unable to lift my hands, one still attached to an intravenous drip, the other to a monitor. I moved my head in the direction of the bedside table. “It’s that green stuff on the tray.”
“I don’t want Jell-O,” Alan said. “It looks like goo.”
Anna laughed.
“It’s good,” I said. “You’d like it. It feels slippery and cool going down.”
“Why didn’t you eat it?” Alan said.
I had no answer.
“I don’t want it,” he said.
“One thing you can do for me,” I said to Anna.
“Okay, but just one thing.”
“I’d like to meet with a lawyer before I leave here.”
“What for?” she said.
(I was reluctant to speak of this in front of Alan. I had it in mind to make my will. I’d decided to leave my estate—Sara’s money, the house, the car—to Anna. Sara’s brother and sister had been well provided for; Anna and Sara had been, when I met them, the closest of friends; if it hadn’t been for me, their friendship might have been lifelong. If, as now looked unlikely, Anna were to predecease me, the estate would go to Anna’s children, to be split three ways among them. Anna was able to find a lawyer who would come to the hospital. He drew up a simple will according to my instructions. He mailed a copy, which I will soon give to Anna, to the 14th Street address in Calgary, and kept a copy for his files.)
“There are some things I need to settle,” I said.
Anna shook her head. “I don’t want your money, Ray.”
“Don’t worry,” I said.
Then Alan spoke to me. “Will they take my heart, Ray?”
“No,” I said emphatically. “They will not take your heart.”
“You are free now,” Anna said. “No one will take your heart. No one will take any part of you.”
“I am still a clone,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “But you are safe with me. We are safe together.”
Again, to me: “Whose heart will they take?”
“I don’t know that,” I said.
They stayed a while longer. No more was said on th
e matter of Alan’s heart. Or mine. Then we said good-bye. Alan was somber. I tried to be as chipper as I could.
It was four more days until they discharged me. Anna had arranged to have a hospital bed delivered and set up in the bedroom I’d shared with Alan before I went down. Going forward I would share the room with Anna—Alan moving to the other bedroom—who now became my nurse, so that she would be near if, in the night, I needed her. Alan helped me from the car into the apartment. He was uneasy touching me, as if he was afraid I might shatter. I got into bed, and I have hardly left it these three months.
That first morning back, after breakfast, I asked Anna to get out the boot socks.
“What are boot socks?” Alan said.
“Wait,” I said.
“Are they for me?” Alan said.
“Hang on. Will you get the socks, Anna?”
She took the socks out of the dresser drawer. “Now what?”
“I want you to empty them.”
“Boot socks.” Alan said. “What’s in them?”
“Money,” I said.
“Is it money for me?” he said.
“Some of it.”
“What are you doing, Ray?” Anna said.
“I know what I’m doing.”
She emptied the socks onto her bed. There were six stacks of bills, each stack held together by a thick rubber band.
“I don’t want the boot socks,” Alan said.
“Fine,” I said.
“I would like the money.”
“I know,” I said. Then, to Anna: “Will you take five thousand dollars and put it in one of the socks?”
“Five thousand?”
“Yes.”
“You’re a sweet man,” she said. “But this is crazy.”
“We both know I’m not sweet,” I said. “And this makes perfect sense.”
Anna counted out the bills and put them in a sock.
“Can I have the sock, please?” I said.
Anna handed the sock to me.
“Come here,” I said to Alan.
“All right,” he said. He came closer.
I handed him the sock. “This money is for you.” I said. “You can spend it however you like, so long as Anna says it’s okay. Do you understand?”
He took the money out of the sock and held it in his hand. “This money is for me?”
“Yes.”
“I can spend this money?”
“Yes. So long as Anna says it’s okay.”
“If she says it’s okay, I can spend it?”
“Yes,” I said.
Alan looked at Anna. “No girl,” he said.
“No girl,” she said.
“There is one thing,” I said, “I want you to buy right away. Today.”
“You want me to buy it today?”
“Yes. I want you and Anna to go out today and buy a computer.”
“I want to buy a computer,” he said. “I told you that. Do you remember?” He said this without any enthusiasm, and with more than a hint of recrimination. As if to say my offer was not so much too little as it was too late.
“I do. I want you to buy a computer. Anna will help you pick it out. It will be your computer. But I will use it for a little while.”
“It will be my computer, but you will use it?”
“Yes,” I said. “For just a little while. Then it will be yours.”
“It will be my computer?”
“In a little while,” I said.
Twelve
“You’re going to write the report,“ Anna said.
“I was thinking I would,” I said. “If I can remember how to write.”
“Good, Ray. That’s good.”
“I’ve got nothing better to do.”
“No. You want to write it.”
“I suppose I do. I’m not sure why.”
When Anna had satisfied herself I was comfortable and safe in my bed, that I would stay put, she and Alan went out and bought a computer. They picked one Alan liked the look of—they paid for it with Alan’s money—and Anna set it up.
(I am comfortable. As comfortable waiting for my heart to quit in a rented hospital bed in a crap shack in Calgary as I have been anywhere else in Canada. As I have been anywhere else. From my mother I know the Germans have a word, heimweh, for the kind of homesick-ness you feel, even when you are at home. Everywhere you go you find what you find everywhere you go. After Sara died, I have been, without respite, homesick, with no notable increase in the feeling since we washed up here. Moribund heart or no.)
“Besides the obvious, ‘Can I write the thing?’ ”—I had the computer in front of me (the bed came with a narrow rolling table that could be placed across it)—“the question is, ‘Will I have the time?’ ”
This was the middle of June.
Anna would not speak of this imminence. “Listen,” she said. “You’ll want to use pseudonyms. For all of us.”
“What shall I call you?”
“You can call me anything you want?” She smiled. Ruefully. “Not Twink.”
“Not Twink. No.”
“Make me lovely,” she said. “Make me sound lovely.”
“You are lovely, Anna.”
“That’s a lie. That is such a lie. You are such a liar.”
“You are,” I said. “I think so.”
“I’ve been thinking about a name for you,” she said.
“What is it? Shitheel?”
“I was thinking ‘Ray Bradbury.’ ”
“Why that?”
“He was a writer. We had his books in the house. My mother read him as a girl. He wrote mostly science fiction.”
“Was he good?” I said. “Because I won’t be good. This won’t be science fiction.”
“I’m sure he was good,” she said. “I never read him, but my mother liked him. I always liked the name. Sounds confident. Authoritative. Honest.”
“I am none of those.”
“Become them,” she said.
“I want my real name, Ray,” Alan said. He was lying on the other bed—it had for a short time been his, but since my return from the hospital, it was Anna’s—his clothes on, and his shoes, the pillow laid over his eyes. This was how he was to spend his days, much of them, from then on: lying in that bed—in effect, however dashed he was, keeping me company—while I worked on my report. I wondered what name he had in mind.
“I want to be Alan,” he said.
His real name. Even I could see the sad, bitter irony here.
“You will be Alan,” I said. “I promise.”
Unhappily, for all of us, after he’d bought the computer—he has yet to take possession of it, and no longer cares—there was almost nothing Alan really wanted to buy.
“I want to buy a car,” he said, several days after I’d given him the money. He was at his post, splayed out on Anna’s bed. I’d begun writing, and was glad for any interruption.
“You don’t know how to drive,” I said.
“You can teach me to drive. You are a teacher.”
“I can’t get out of bed.”
“When you are better you can get out of bed. Then you can teach me.” He took the pillow off his eyes and sat up. “I have an idea. Anna can teach me. Anna is a teacher. She can drive. She can teach me.”
“Maybe she will,” I said.
Anna heard her name spoken and looked in.
“Maybe I will what?”
“Maybe you will teach me to drive,” Alan said. “You are a teacher. I will buy a car, and you will teach me to drive.”
She looked at me.
“Don’t look at me,” I said.
“First I’ll teach you to drive,” Anna said. “Then we’ll see about a car.”
“First you will teach me to drive?”
“Yes.”
“Then we will see about a car?”
“We’ll see about it,” she said. “I’m not promising anything.”
“We will see about it,” he said.
Th
e next Sunday morning, in an effort to lift his declining spirits, with the concomitant risk of inflating his hopes, Anna drove the truck over to the middle school not far from our apartment, so Alan could practice in the parking lot. He drove around the lot with Anna beside him. “I had to give him almost no instruction,” Anna told me later that night. Alan was in his room. We were in bed. She in hers, etc. We no longer worried about him sneaking out: he had given up that ghost. “I found myself hoping if I let him alone,” she said, “he’d drive us into a brick wall, and we’d be finished with it.” I laughed. “I mean it,” she said. “He drove in wide circles, then narrowed them. He spent a few minutes in reverse. I think, actually, he’d be a good driver. He fooled with the knobs and switches. He turned the lights on and off, flicked the brights. We couldn’t see the lights in the sun. He tried the radio, which, of course, didn’t work. He honked the horn. When he had done all he could think to do in the parking lot, he looked at me and said, ‘Thank you for teaching me.’ Then he got out of the truck, and I drove us back to the apartment. There is nowhere he wants to go.”
Anna took him to the mall for what she promoted as a “shopping spree.”
“We look in all the stores,” she told him. “If you see something you like, something you want to buy—if it’s a reasonable thing, if you can afford it—you can buy it.”
“Is that a shopping spree?” he said.
“That’s what I call it,” Anna said.
“I will spend my money?”
“Some of it,” she said. “If you see something you like.”
“Will Ray go on the shopping spree?”
“I can’t,” I said. “I have work to do.” Almost unimaginably, this was now the truth.
“He has to write his report,” Anna said.
“I know that,” Alan said. “Will he remember?”
“Will I remember what?” I said.
“My name.”
“You will be Alan,” I said. “I’ll remember. When you get back, you can show me what you got.”
They were back in two hours, more quickly than I’d expected. I was dozing when they came in. I found I could work for an hour, an hour and a half, then I had to rest.
Alan came into the room ahead of Anna. “Ray is snoring,” he said. Without another word to me, he slumped onto Anna’s bed, unfurled himself, and dropped a pillow over his eyes.
“How was the shopping spree?” I said to Anna. She was in the doorway, holding a large plastic shopping bag loaded with stuff.
The Bradbury Report Page 30