The Bradbury Report

by Steven Polansky

  “In a way,” I said. “Yes. It does. It depends on a lot of things.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Does it hurt whom?”

  “Does it hurt the girl?”

  “It can,” I said.

  “Why can it?”

  “If you’re too rough,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t be too rough,” he said.

  “I’m sure you wouldn’t.”

  “I wouldn’t hurt her.”

  “Listen, Alan,” I said, thinking, too late, I ought to end the conversation, which could lead only to more frustration and sadness for him. “It’s not something to get all worked up about.”

  “I am all worked up.”

  “I know you are. I’m sorry.”

  “You’re not worked up about it, Ray, because you’re old.”

  “You may be right.”

  “I may be right,” he said. “When you were my age, were you worked up about it?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Did you love Sara?”

  “Very much.”

  “Do you love me?”

  “I do love you,” I said, before I had a chance to think about it.

  “Do I love you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t know either,” he said. “Do I love Anna?”

  “She loves you. I know that.”

  “I know that, too,” he said.

  He didn’t say anything for a minute. He may have been thinking about what I’d said, and/or coming to grips with my uselessness. Then he stood up and walked to the door. He turned to look at me. He held up the doll, intact.

  “I made this,” he said.

  “I know,” I said.

  “You don’t know.”

  “I was watching you.”

  “You weren’t watching me,” he said.

  “I was.”

  “You weren’t watching me. You weren’t there,” he said. “I made this doll.”

  He turned off the light.

  Thirteen

  We are just about out of time.

  It is the 25th. We have—thirty days hath September—after this one, six days.

  As I write this, Anna is in the kitchen making dinner, opening and closing cupboards and drawers, clanging pots, rattling flatware, trying desperately to keep herself occupied. Alan is in Anna’s room. He locked himself in there this morning, when the Tall Man left, trailing havoc, and has not come out.

  We have gone from the soup to the shit.

  The Tall Man showed up about the time we’d finished breakfast. Alan was at the table looking over the Michelangelo bible, which I inscribed—beneath the Kolberg’s inscription to their daughter—and gave to him as a gift. “To Alan:” I wrote. “My roommate, my brother, my friend. With admiration and affection. Ray.” Beneath that, “Calgary” and the date. Uninspired stuff. I’d bought the thing as a prop, under duress, and was merely handing it down. I watched Alan read the inscriptions. He made no comment. He seemed interested in the color plates. It had long been my plan to give him the bible when the time came.

  “I’m sorry,” the Tall Man said. “Again I’ve come at your breakfast.”

  “We’ve finished,” I said.

  “Sit down,” Anna said.

  “Thanks, I won’t,” he said. “I’ll not stay long. I’ve come to tell you, I regret to tell you, that your decision is academic now.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “I mean you can stay with Ray.” Glancing at Alan: “We’ve decided to take him.”

  Alan did not look up from the bible.

  “Take him?” Anna said.

  “We think he’s ready.”

  “You can’t take him.” Anna said.

  “Of course we can.”

  “He’s not nearly ready,” Anna said. “I need more time with him.”

  “We think he’s ready. You have until the first of the month.”

  “That’s not enough time,” she said. “I promise I’ll tell you when I think he’s ready. I won’t need too much longer.”

  “It’s not your decision,” he said. “I’m sorry. But there’s no surprise here. This was the plan all along. Just a matter of when. I’ll be back for him on the first. At noon. We’ll expect you to have him packed.”

  “Please don’t do this,” Anna said. “Don’t take him from me. There can’t be such a rush.”

  I was, belatedly, about to say something—no doubt callow and inflammatory—when Alan stood up.

  “Listen to me,” he said.

  “I’m listening,” the Tall Man said.

  “I will not go with you.”

  “You will go,” the Tall Man said.

  “Where will you take him?” Anna said.

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Let me come with him,” she said. “I can still be of use.”

  “I’m sorry,” the Tall Man said. “I did what I could. It’s my sense that you, and I, have become a nuisance. You can take consolation in this: he will be very useful. Very effective.”

  “I will not be useful,” Alan said.

  The Tall Man smiled. “You will not only be useful, son, you will be revolutionary. Transformative.”

  “What did you say?”

  “You will change everything.”

  Late in the afternoon Anna came into my bedroom. She woke me up. We had not spoken since the Tall Man’s visit.

  “I’ve been trying to think of a way to keep them from taking him,” she said. “Some way to forestall it. He won’t go willingly. We know that. They’ll have to take him. I’m afraid they’ll hurt him. Or he’ll hurt himself.”

  I humped myself up into a sitting position, my back against the crummy headboard.

  “I should just take him and go,” she said. “Right away. Leave the country. We could move from place to place. You could help us, Ray. You could give us some money.”

  “I would,” I said. “Of course. If that’s what you decide to do.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t even know how far we’d have to go, or if we could go far enough.” She sat down on Alan’s bed. “He won’t go,” she said. “I know he won’t.”

  “Why won’t he?” I said. “With you he’d go.”

  “I don’t think so. Not now. I’ll tell you, Ray. I think he’s decided to die.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I just think so,” she said. “Watching him, this morning.”

  “I didn’t see that, Anna,” I said. “He seemed pretty combative.”

  “Maybe I could inflict some injury. The way boys used to shoot off their toes. I could do something that would make him useless.”

  “Like what?” I said. “Cut out his tongue?”

  “I couldn’t do anything to cause him pain.”

  “I know you couldn’t.”

  “Not even to save him from pain? Not even then?”

  “I don’t know, Anna.”

  “Here’s what I know,” she said. “I’m his friend. Maybe his first friend. I’m his teacher. But I have no rights in this matter. I am not his mother. I’m not his wife. Or his lover.”

  “Still,” I said.

  “I am furious, Ray. With the Tall Man. With the group. I’m more furious with myself. My complicity. My naivete. For this, for them, I was willing to leave my own children behind. What sort of mother does that? For any reason. For any cause. For someone I’d never met. No matter how much he was you. What do I do, Ray? What would you do?”

  “If I were you?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Tell me something.”

  “I would let him go. I would let them take him. You’ve done what you could. You’ve given him a year. You’ve cared for him very well. You’ve cared for me. Christ, you’ve been magnificent.”

  “Thank you, Ray.”

  “I’d let him go, Anna. And me. I’d let me go. I’d go back to my children.”

  “I’d be putting them in danger,” she said.<
br />
  “Ahhh,” I said. An old man’s sound. A dismissive sound my father—he didn’t live to be an old man—might make when he wasn’t as sure as he wanted to seem. “There’s got to be some way to do it.”

  At dinner that night, last night—I write this after breakfast the following day, September 26—Alan offered me his heart. Anna and I were at the table. I was eating dinner; Anna couldn’t bring herself to eat. Alan remained locked inside her bedroom. She’d announced three times at the bedroom door that dinner was ready. He did not respond. She was concerned he might do, might already have done, something to himself.

  “I don’t hear him in there,” she said to me. She pushed her chair back and stood up. “I’ll be right back.”

  She left the apartment. She was gone several minutes. “I went around the side of the building,” she said when she returned. She was daunted, out of breath, this woman who never flagged. “I thought I’d be able to see him through the window, but he had the curtains drawn. A light was on. I rapped at the window, called his name. What do we do?”

  “I guess we wait,” I said. “He’ll come out. He’ll get hungry, and he’ll come out. You should eat something.”

  “What if he’s not all right?” she said. “Shouldn’t we try to open the door?”

  “How would we do that?”

  “We could jimmy the lock,” she said. “There’s a little hole in the knob. I’ve got a bobby pin.”

  Before Anna’s idea could be tested, as if thinking about fooling with the lock was enough to open the door, we heard Alan come out. He looked fine—calm and steady-eyed. I found his composure worrisome.

  “Oh, thank goodness,” Anna said.

  He approached the table. He did not sit down or speak. He stood facing us.

  “Are you hungry?”

  A simple question that, in the circumstances, sounded discordant.

  “I am not hungry,” he said to her.

  “Sit with us,” I said.

  “I won’t sit with you.” He looked at me, and said quietly, as though he didn’t want Anna to hear, “I want to give you my heart.”

  “No,” Anna said.

  “I want you to take my heart,” he said to me.

  “No,” Anna said more emphatically.

  Alan persisted, not looking at Anna. “I want to give you my heart, Ray.”

  Anna stood up. “Absolutely not,” she said. I was not surprised by her choice—or by how unhesitant and unqualified it was—and took no issue with it. “You just put that out of your mind,” she said.

  “It is not your mind,” Alan said.

  “I don’t care,” she said. “I don’t want you to say that again. I don’t want you to think it.” She tried to take him in her arms, but he deflected her.

  “I will think it,” he said. He hadn’t raised his voice.

  “You will not think it,” she said. “You will not say it.” She turned to me. “Ray?”

  “Listen to me, Alan.” I stayed sitting. “I’m touched you would make such an offer. I’m happy, and I’m sad, at the same time, that you would say you want to give me your heart. I am happy you like me enough to say it. You are very generous to say it. It shows you are a good man. Which I already knew about you. But it makes me sad to hear you say it. I can’t take your heart. I won’t take your heart, because I like you, too. And because it would not be right.” I looked at Anna, who seemed to want me to enlarge. I could think of nothing else to say. I resorted to the sentiments and language of movies, and, though Alan would not have known this, debased us all. “You are a young man,” I said, “and you have most of your life left to live. I am an old man. I have already had my life. It would be wrong of me to take your heart, and I won’t do it. But I am grateful to you. You are noble and very brave.”

  I looked at Anna. Then, to Alan: “Okay?”

  “No,” he said. “I am a clone.”

  “That is true,” I said. “But you can be whatever you want.”

  “I can be nothing else.”

  “You can,” I said.

  “I can’t be you.”

  “You wouldn’t want to be.”

  He looked at Anna.

  “Please,” he said.

  “No,” Anna said.

  He looked at me.

  “No, Alan,” I said.

  That stood as the last word. Alan went back into Anna’s bedroom and locked the door.

  I’ve had a night and most of a day to think about Alan’s offer, to which my response, in the moment, was derivative and glib, incommensurate. It is now late in the afternoon, and, except to use the bathroom—during these excursions, we thought it better not to waylay him—Alan has been locked inside Anna’s bedroom. We have not seen him eat in at least a day. Anna is afraid he is starving himself.

  The first thing to say about it, his offer, is that it was no mere gesture. If I was willing to accept his heart (Anna would have killed me first), he would give it to me. He understands about death, and, from his conversations with Anna subsequent to our telling him who he was, he knows he would surely die if his heart is taken. By any measure, his offer was heroic.

  What I can’t quite work out is why he made the offer. Even if Anna is right, and he does care more about me than he lets on, that doesn’t explain why he is willing to die so that I might gain a few more unproductive, superfluous years.

  There is this: Alan’s willingness to sacrifice himself for me, and by doing so, to live out his purpose as a clone, is nothing short of revolutionary, and, thus, paradoxically, fully human. It would be almost certainly the first and only time a clone would have served his original by choice, as an act of free will. The first time, for that matter, a clone would have exercised his free will in any meaningful way. He might not be able to articulate it, but I think on some level Alan knows this.

  This, too: having heard us talk about it, Alan understands that, when he somehow came free of the Clearances, he became, irreversibly, a grave and intolerable threat to the government. So that now, wherever he goes, they will pursue him without letup until he is captured, and that, once captured, he will be executed. He knows, too, more proximately, what his life will be like for however long he is to survive under the protection of Anna’s group. If they have him—they already have him—and have their way, he will be “celebrated” wherever they permit him to surface. He will be the public face of the movement. He will be required to speak out against the idea of cloning and clones. To speak out against himself. To be his own nemesis. Safe to say that Alan would want neither of these alternatives. I believe he preferred to help me, rather than to die at the hands of his makers, or to be pitilessly traduced at the hands of his keepers.

  I don’t mean by this in any way to devalue his offer, just to understand it. I think if he was able or willing to talk about it, he would acknowledge that, given the alternatives he is facing, his decision to give me his heart was not simply “heroic.” I think his decision was meant to approximate an instance of altruism, to (forgive me) replicate it, and thereby to enter, or almost enter, the human community of human selves. Which community, which version of selfhood, he idealizes and sadly overestimates. But I believe he sees giving me his heart as the only way he can participate in a human life he will, otherwise, have no chance to live.

  If Alan was in my position, needing a heart, and I was in his, with a healthy heart to give, would I make the offer? I would not.

  Three days have passed. It is now September 29. The interim has been fraught. I have not written a word.

  When Alan reappeared—he’d stayed closeted and we’d not seen him since he’d made his offer the night before—it was dinnertime, on the 26th. We’d finished our meal, but were still at the table. Alan sat down as if nothing of moment had passed between us. He asked Anna if there was anything left to eat.

  “You must be starving,” she said.

  “I am starving,” he said.

  Anna made up a plate and put it in front of him.

  “Th
ank you,” he said. “This will taste good to me.”

  I believe, at this point, Anna knew what was coming next, what Alan had decided to do. I was happy to see him eating, as was Anna, but I—not the deepest diver—did not think to think about any decision he might have been meditating.

  His demeanor, I would have said, was pleasant and entirely un-foreboding. When he’d done eating, he said there was something he wanted to ask us. He was courteous enough to include me, but it was Anna he wanted to speak to.

  “How do I die?” he said to her. He was calm. He might have been asking where we kept the cereal.

  “What are you asking me?” Anna said. She knew full well.

  “I’m asking you, ‘How do I die?’ I don’t know how to die. How do you do it? You tell me.”

  “There is no reason for you to die,” she said.

  “There is not no reason,” he said. “How do you do it, Anna?”

  This exchange began a discussion about Alan’s determination to die that lasted the better part of two days, and was exhausting for Anna, less so for me (Alan was inexhaustible), and in which discussion—I participated, between irresistible naps, as a kind of subaltern—we were able to say nothing either to dissuade or divert him from his resolve. Afterwards, Anna insisted we agree to talk no more about it, so as not to wreck the time we had left, however it ended.

  At some latter point in the conversation, Anna did reluctantly address his initial and persevering question. “When the time comes,” she said to him, “if you still want to do it, I will find a way for you.”

  “I will still want to do it,” Alan said.

  “I hope you won’t,” she said. “I pray you won’t.”

  “When will the time come?”

  “We have until the thirtieth to decide.”

  “What day is today?” he asked me, the mathematician.

  I thought about lying to him, rigging the game, but I told him what day it was.

  “We have four days,” he said, and from that moment, he kept scrupulous track.

  Anna tried to find ways they could pass the time they had left together with some steadiness, some peace of mind—her steadiness, her peace of mind; Alan was steady and at peace—ways, more or less, to keep him, them, occupied. (In bed most of the time, I was not much of a diversion.) “I feel like Scheherazade,” she said to me, then had to explain the allusion. She knew her plan—wholly ad hoc, seat of the pants—in the end amounted to nothing other than a plan to turn him over to the group. She needn’t have tried so hard. She was not happy or at peace, not for a moment, no matter what they did. However short the time would be, for her it was purgatory. And Alan, irrespective of her efforts, was, except for scattered moments of frustration, happier than we’d ever seen him. He was unfailingly good company. He spent some time sitting on the bed opposite mine—Anna had reinstalled herself in my bedroom—and, in my presence, he did no brooding or stewing, showed no fear or regret. Admirable boy, he was self-contained. He didn’t speak of his, if he followed through, impending death. He grew increasingly, unnervingly peaceful, until, at the last, he was so serene, Anna said, it broke her heart.