The Bradbury Report (10 page)

“I can't. And why would I decide to?”

“That's not something I can tell you.”

“You want me to decline,” I said.

“I do,” she said. “You know, this is not easy for me. More than anything I want what your account would help bring about. I despise the practice of cloning. I want it to end. I want not one other clone to be made. But I have no right to ask this of you. The risks are enormous.”

“Have you asked?”

“No,” she said. “I have not. I have told you what they want you to do.”

“They know you're here?”

“They sent me.”

“So I'm already involved.”

“Yes.”

“Can I decline? Can I choose not to do what they ask?”

“I'm not sure, Ray. I don't know what the consequences will be if you refuse. I don't know what they'll do. I've lost my sense of them. I no longer trust them. I can tell you they won't consult me.”

“I won't be coerced,” I said.

“That's admirable,” she said.

“I'm not unwilling to die,” I said.

“I'm sorry to hear that,” she said. “You should want to live.”

“Why?”

“I can't tell you that either,” she said.

“If I do what they ask, if I write the account, it will be published.”

“Yes. They'll see to that.”

“Where? Here? In the U.S.?”

“I'm not sure. Maybe. Attempts will be made to keep it from appearing. Everywhere else.”

“Who will read it?”

“Everyone,” she said. “At least that's the hope.”

“I can't write,” I said.

“I assure you, Ray, the quality of the prose will not be an issue. What you need to think about is what will happen to you once the account appears.”

At this point, I felt little fear. The dangers were wholly theoretical. They bore little connection to the real experience of, say, physical pain or extinction, if one does, in fact, experience extinction. Now, as I write this, the situation is decreasingly theoretical, and, though I've felt no pain as yet, nothing out of the ordinary, the real stuff is close. Still, I am not afraid. This is not a function of courage. I've discovered,
too late for it to be of any use to me, that I am not without courage, but I believe my present lack of fear, a species of detachment, has more to do with the sadness and fatigue that fill me. There is little room in me for fear.

“What will happen?”

“They will kill you,” she said. “They will find you, wherever you go, and they will kill you.”

“We're not talking about your group now.”

“No,” she said. “Though once
they
have your account, I expect there's nothing they'll like better than your death. It would be a great boon for them. Maybe more powerful than the report itself. As a martyr you'd be very useful. You'd be eloquent.”

“If you've thought of that, won't they?”

“The government, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Yes,” she said, “they'll think of it. Of course.”

“But it won't stop them.”

“No. They won't let you live. They can't. You will know, you will have seen, too much.”

“So either way,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, “I don't know. You could refuse and take your chances. I can't say for sure what my group will do. The other way, you'd have no chance. It's not a happy choice.”

“Then your coming here . . . ?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Thanks.”

“I'm sorry,” she said. “Whatever happens to you will happen to me. That's a small consolation, I know.”

“It's no consolation.” I said. “It is all the more reason to refuse. Why on earth would I do this? I won't do this. Go home. Tell them that I won't do it.”

“Listen, Ray,” she said. “Put aside any concern you have for me. I knew what I was doing when I came here. I've already made my decision. If it were my clone, if it were my report to write, I would. I wish
it were my clone. I wish it were. That would be easier. It wouldn't be easy, but it would be easier. I would be frightened. I would be sad. I am frightened, and sad. But I would do it.”

“You would do it,” I said.

“Ray. I'm saying what I would do. I'm not saying what I think you should do.”

“I know,” I said. “You would do it?”

“Yes.”

“What about your children?”

“They have nothing to do with your decision,” she said. “I won't talk about them now.”

 

If I could have managed it, I would be buried beside Sara, and we'd both be buried in New Hampshire. On a hill in the country just outside the town where she and I lived is a small cemetery that would have been cozy. My parents are buried in a churchyard just fifteen miles to the south. Sara is buried in Indianola. Her father insisted Sara's body be brought back to Iowa. She is buried there, with her parents, in the Bird family plot. I have not been to her grave since the funeral. We had lived together so short a time, I was persuaded they had more right to her than I did. I was easily persuaded, because I was, really, indifferent about where she was buried. Her father could do her no more harm, and I would not see her again.

I was with her in the hospital when she died. I sat by her bed, held her hand. I told her I loved her. I had lost a son I never got to see. There could be little doubt I would soon lose my wife. I was blasted, separated from myself, yanked out of my mind, unable to think or feel. Sara was not conscious of me, for which I am grateful. I don't remember much about the time I spent with her in that hospital room. I don't remember the moment she died. I don't remember what the doctor said, or how he said it, or what I did after that. I ought to remember it all, but I have only one discrete memory from those cavernous hours.

Her parents had flown in for the birth of our son. The baby was already dead by the time they arrived. They were in the waiting room.
They were distraught. I was sorry they were there. Her father was loathsome. Her mother was inoffensive; she had done nothing to earn my enmity. For her sake, I tried to keep them informed. I came out at regular intervals to bring them word. There was never anything to say. Sara's condition continued to worsen, and then she died. At some point, after six or seven hours of this deathwatch, I left the room with the vague intention of getting a candy bar and a drink from some vending machines I thought I'd seen on the way in. I didn't know what I was doing, or where I was going. I wandered off. When I got back to the room, having to be led there by a hospital volunteer, having forgotten why I'd left, Sara's father, the Reverend Bird, was standing over her. The room was dark; he had turned off the lights. He had some kind of prayer book in his hand, and he was reading from it aloud. I don't know what he was intoning, though I've told myself, subsequently, he was performing the last rites. I knew that if she were awake, if she could hear him, see him standing there in the dark, Sara would be terrified. She would not want him there, doing that. I was furious. I told him to get out. He could see how angry I was and, wisely, did not resist.

T
he heart is a vulgar thing. For all its symbolic currency—it is the only organ that so resonates (imagine a comparable poetic fuss made over the liver or lungs)—it is ignoble. A deep red mass of muscle tissue—quadripartite, not heart-shaped—with pipes and valves. On the streets of Calgary,
my
heart, already damaged, already rickety and winded, for the second time in a year threatened to shut down altogether. The cardiologist who saw me there, meaning, I think, to ease me of blame, said, “It may simply be your heart was programmed to last you until now, and not much longer.”

I might have taken a new heart. It need not have come from
my
clone. Had I asked for one, it would have been taken from some superfluous clone. The heart perfectly homologous—the government has no cause to be sloppy; its supply of hearts is inexhaustible—but still a stranger, a disrupter of whatever sense of intimacy I might have had with my own body. (In the days before cloning, there was inculcated between donor and recipient—with the aim, largely, of promoting organ donation—the notion of solidarity. In the current mode of exchange, where the “donation” is in no respect volitional, no permission sought, among other things we have lost, we have lost that.)

In what way, for whom, is my extended survival necessary? Or good? What is my presence here, that my absence would be significant?
And these questions are beside the point. Even if my life were worth prolonging, I could not have taken a heart from my clone. Or from any other.

I am writing this report. There may be value in that.

In this one respect, at least, it seems I cling to life: I am aware of my heart, alert to it, as never before. I attend to its systoles and diastoles, its firings and misses, as if I were leaning in to catch the last whispers of someone I loved. I have earned the metaphor. This one, too: What would my life with Sara have been like, her life with me, if I had had a different heart?

The texture of our brief life together—I mean the whole, not just the surface texture—was, until the very last, peaceful and easy. We were congenial. We did not fight, or rarely. There was never any anger sustained between us. We worked well and productively together. We kept a clean and orderly house, and took comfort in our thrift. We traveled when we could. We enjoyed each other's company. I was faithful. By rule and nature, but also because I could not believe my luck. She was a fine and beautiful woman, and, to risk belaboring the point, I was, in all ways, ordinary and undistinguished. I believe she was faithful to me. (I mean in saying this to cast no doubt.) I know—I always knew—I was less than what she needed me to be. That as her husband, principally in the quality of my love, day by day I failed her. I believe she loved me, and that her capacity to give and receive love was far greater than my own. I see now I didn't do enough to help her realize that capacity, come full into her endowment. To love me in the way I asked to be loved, in the way, perhaps, I permitted her to love me, she didn't need to love enough, at a pitch sufficiently high or a level sufficiently deep, to love the way she could. The waste of it is what, after all the years, I can't stop feeling. I taste it still on my tongue. It is what I see, too often, when I close my eyes. Our life together so short. My obtuseness. My reserve. Unforgivable.

Though I didn't see this at the start, she came to me sad and broken. Beyond what I could imagine, watching her with her father, I don't know much about her childhood in Indianola. For good reason, she was not eager to talk about it. The truth is, I'm not sure I cared
to know more than I did. She was the eldest of three children and the primary, I'd say obsessive, focus of her father's attentions. She had a brother and a sister. Her father left the two of them all but exclusively to the care of their mother, who, in return for this sop, seemed willing to surrender all parental rights and influence with respect to Sara. When he knew she would be beautiful—I've seen the pictures: Sara
en pointe
in
Sleeping Beauty
; Sara with her violin; Sara sitting on her Connemara pony; Sara in her cotillion gown—her father, the Reverend Bird, a desperate Anglophile, had a vision for Sara. In imagining her become what he wanted her to become, in fashioning her for his own delight, I believe he conflated two types, neither of which he'd ever bumped up against in the flesh: the nineteenth-century squire's daughter and the southern belle (the second, of which there was a surfeit at William and Mary when I was there, is, I'm guessing, just a poor copy of the first). He enrolled her at St. Agatha's, a K-12 Episcopal school for girls. He insisted she take lessons on the piano and violin. He had her study dance with a teacher in Des Moines, and, by the time she was fourteen, Sara was lead dancer in that city's youth ballet company. He bought her the pony, Finn (alas, even the pony gets an alias), which he boarded on a farm west of Indianola, and paid a matronly Devonshire woman, married to a fellow priest in the bishopric, to instruct her in equitation and dressage. He took an avid, unnatural interest in her clothes and hair and makeup and jewelry. It was he who decided her ears should be pierced. He insisted she get biweekly manicures. Even after we were married, he persisted in appraising her appearance, and continued to send her expensive jewelry and clothes, which, by then—this made me very glad—she would not wear.

I met him for the first time at Easter, 2027. It had been only since late January that Sara had been living with me in my apartment above the Hmong gift shop in downtown Ames. She had not told her parents about our arrangement. She was expected home for the holiday. She asked me to drive her to Indianola and stay the weekend. She wanted her family to meet me. We would be married the following September, on the 12th, but, at that point, Easter, neither of us had yet mentioned the prospect of marriage, and I, at least, hadn't
given it a thought. I don't know what she was thinking. She neglected to brief me about her father. I knew only that he was an Episcopal priest. If I expected anything—I don't know that I bothered to form expectations—I expected to find the family not especially well off, living humbly and simply, in the proximity of the church, in a house provided for them by the parish. Sara never spoke about money and didn't seem to have much of it.

They were wealthy. Growing up in New Hampshire I knew no one so manifestly affluent. The house was in a new and demoralizingly sterile subdemesne called Thrushcroft, and nowhere near the church. Palais Bird, as I liked to think of it. It was an architectural monstrosity. At base a sort of ersatz and hypertrophied English Tudor, with a roof meant to look, very broadly, like thatch, perversely combined with, among other anomalies, a quasi-Corinthian colonnade on either side of the front door, ultramodern casement windows in the façade, and a Victorian cupola center top. Inside, it was opulent—crystal chandeliers, marble floors, hand-knotted oriental rugs, gold-plated fixtures. In one of the formal reception rooms there was an ornate, working harpsichord—I heard Sara play it—from, I think, the sixteenth century. In another, even larger room, which opened out on a brick-and-stone terrace overlooking the formal garden at the back of the house—it was still too early in the Iowa spring for much of anything to be in bloom—was a Steinway grand her father made sure to mention had been played during an American tour by Rachmaninoff. Coming through the front door and standing face to face with a staircase that might have been lifted from a Venetian palazzo (I have not been to Venice, and know nothing, firsthand, about the palazzi there, or their staircases. I take it they are sweeping and grand.), I was be-dazzled. Sara's mother was waiting for us in the entryway, which, I discovered, looking up into a glazed and gilded dome, was an atrium three stories high. Where did the money come from for this garish and profligate display? It as sure as hell did
not
come from the salary paid her father by the church. Though it made her family situation even more repugnant, I took great satisfaction in learning from Sara that her father contributed almost nothing to the pot. He absolved himself of
any real financial responsibility on the grounds that he was a man of God, at the same time he spent wantonly the money that came, almost without limit, from his wife's family, who had, for several generations, owned a shipping line back in Norway.