The Bradbury Report (17 page)

 

(My son died, too. I never saw him. Anna spoke about cloning the dead. Imagine. I might have raised my wife and my son, a little girl and little boy, together.)

I find not much honor or consolation in this enterprise, but I will honor, if I can, my agreement with Anna's group and try to finish this account, as expeditiously as I can.

 

Anna called me, as she said she would, three days from the time she left New Hampshire. It was Thursday, August 13. She was back in Iowa. The conversation was short.

“How was your trip?” I said.

“Long. Tedious. Flat. I'm glad to be home. How are you feeling?”

“The same as when you left. I feel decrepit. I feel fragile. Moderately bewildered. I was waiting for your call.”

“Here it is,” she said. “I didn't want to call you.”

“But you did.”

“I told you I would,” she said. “I'm sorry.”

“I read your journal. What did you call it, your notebook.”

When she didn't respond, I said, “It was hard to read.”

“Sorry to put you through it.” That had some edge. Then she softened. “It was hard to write.”

“I'm sure it was,” I said. “No. It was good.”

“Good?”

“I mean remarkable. Sad. I've tried to think what to say to you. It was very moving. It was helpful. Incriminating. It made me feel
trifling. Worse. I've been cavalier, oblivious. I've been inexcusably ignorant. There's a human being here.”

“There are three human beings here,” she said.

“Yes. Of course. Anyway. It was really something to read.”

“Good,” she said. “Then good. Then it's good you read it.”

“It
is
good.”

“Now be smart,” she said.

“Listen. Anna.” I said. “I'm not all that steady. If you try to dissuade me, you might succeed. Why don't you just ask me if I'll do it, and let me answer?”

“Have you given this enough thought?”

“Definitely not,” I said. “You called to ask me.”

“Wait,” she said. “I have to say this. If I'd had the presence of mind, when I first saw the clone, to keep quiet, they'd never have known about you. You wouldn't be involved.”

“Probably true,” I said. “But irrelevant. I don't blame you, Anna. As far as I can tell, I'm not sorry. Maybe I will be.”

“You will,” she said.

“Maybe I will.”

“Meaning you want to do this?”

“Do I
want
to? I think I do. I'm willing to do it,” I said. “If you ask me to. And provided you and your group accept my conditions.”

“I'll have nothing to do with it,” she said. “For goodness sake, it will not be up to me. You must believe that.”

“I do believe it,” I said. “Then provided
they
accept my conditions.”

“What are they? Your conditions.”

“I want no direct contact, at any time, with anyone in your group. Excepting you. I am not one of them. If I do this, I do it because I've chosen to, for reasons of my own. Which are none of their business. They need to agree they will try to exert no influence over what I write. Will they agree to that? Whoever they are?”

“I don't know,” she said. “I don't know what they'll do.”

“Will you tell them what I said?”

“I am sorry to hear this, Ray,” she said. “I am very sorry.”

“But you'll tell them,” I said.

“I don't know that I will.”

“Well, that's
your
decision,” I said.

 

In truth, I had given
my
decision very little thought, considering the nature and putative risk of what was asked of me. I made the decision so quickly and casually—I believe I knew what I would do before Anna left New Hampshire—I wonder now at my nonchalance. It was, I have to say, less a decision, really, then a relinquishment, a relaxation. I relaxed into the idea that I would do this. I mean, almost involuntarily, I let fall away all resistance to the idea. Was it because I felt, not altogether wrongly, that I had nothing now to lose, and the very same to live for? (Are these two calculations always equal?) To state the obvious in the obvious way, I was living on borrowed time. If I allowed it to, my heart attack (the first one) might mark the beginning of a new epoch for me. The final epoch—brief, intense, possibly even meaningful. Might I, who had never given off a single spark, go out in a blaze? Was it that, finally, I didn't believe the danger—about which, from the start, Anna had been so insistent—was real? How much had my decision to do with my taking the opportunity to make some amends to Anna for the way I had treated her so long ago? Even I could see how much she was putting at risk. As it was
my
clone who had been found outside the Clearances, perhaps I felt, however ill-definedly, I ought to do something. Or did I, in some bizarre, unprecedented way—had anyone, before me, been in this position?—feel as if I owed it to my self?

No need for this plurality of explanations. The truth here is most likely simple. I had nothing better, nothing else, to do. And I wanted to see my clone. To see myself, again, as I was at twenty-one.

 

I had exactly a week to settle my affairs before Anna came back to get me. (She asked me to do it. I said I would.) I continued to believe I would eventually return to New Hampshire, notwithstanding Anna told me I was to take nothing with me but the clothes and personal articles I might need. Anna was all benevolence, but you'd have to say,
given the apocalyptic contexts in which they'd been issued before, the sadists and more ordinary run of killers who had issued them, those instructions had a dread resonance. At the very least, they suggested that what we were about to do would not end happily.

A word about money, a subject I haven't before now had reason to talk about, and to which I have rarely given any thought. It is not that I consider the subject of money vulgar and dull. I am not above the subject, just outside it. I don't think about money, because I have a lot of it, and because very little of what I have comes from any effort of mine. I am the beneficiary, ongoing, of Sara's familial wealth, relative to which my salary as a high school mathematics teacher was pin money. Had I not been so freed from pecuniary concerns, I would, I'm pretty sure, have been as grubbing and as boorish as the next. I can too easily imagine being the kind of man who thought about, and strived for, not much else.

Anna told me we could not use personal checks or traveler's checks or credit cards or cash machines during our time in Canada, as any of those would leave a trail easily followed. How would we live? How would we eat? I felt entitled to ask. When we got to Montreal, she said, a sufficient sum would be waiting for us. Who from? Her group? Yes, she said. She explained they assumed the government would make sure I did not live long enough after the publication of my report to enjoy any of the profits that might accrue. These profits, per an agreement she would bring with her for me to sign, would revert to the group and, they were confident, would more than defray their investment in us. How sufficient? I asked. Enough for us to live on, she said.

I was not reassured. One of the first things I did in the time I had before Anna came back was to go to the bank and withdraw from my account sixty thousand dollars. Such a sum would, I knew—when, ultimately, the government's attention turned towards me—be suspicious, even damning. I did not tell Anna I'd done this until after we got to Canada. She was angry and alarmed, as you'd have expected her to be, though it was too late for her to do anything about it. When I came to pack my bag, I put the sixty thousand—I'd asked for it in
hundred-dollar bills—in three old L. L. Bean boot socks I had in my drawer, twenty thousand stuffed in each sock.

 

I was to leave my house as if I'd gone on vacation and intended to return. I was not to sell my car, or anything else I might think of selling. (Besides the house, I owned not a thing anyone would want.) When I quit New Hampshire I would leave behind, presumably for good, my adult past, the signal period of which—the only period I cared about—was my time with Sara. Most of
that
time, we were in the Lebanon house.

Before we moved to New Hampshire, we were in Iowa together at the university just shy of two years. We were married in September, on the 12th, at the start of my second academic year there. Sara had graduated the previous June. (By then, Anna had left the university.) For Sara's sake, so she need not fret, and so her father could cut a stylish and sacerdotal figure without having to contend with me, I stayed clear of Commencement. Afterwards, Sara assured me she was willing to hang on in Ames another year, while I finished my degree. I knew—how could I not know?—she was desperate to get out of Iowa and away from her family. Had it not been for me, she would have been on her way to the Sorbonne. Yet I was happy to keep her there.

Contact with her father had become unbearable, an already strained and ambiguous relationship then made much worse by the fact of our marriage. Which fact her father found, in every way, appalling. I had not before in my life been by anyone brought so close to hatred, for all that Sara was his daughter, of his blood. He went mad. He flew into a frenzy, a rage, which, it was plain to see, was chiefly jealousy. He would not talk to Sara about our marriage, in the lead-up to it, except to say that in marrying me she was not just stooping, but slumming, trawling along the bottom. He characterized Sara's choice of me as, his exact words, nothing more than a postpubescent gesture of rebellion. (Which, at least in part, it
was,
however full of heart and nerve.) If she married me, he said without a touch of humility or charity, she'd be condemning herself to a life without refinement, without grace (he meant this not in the theological
sense), without meaning or value, to a life spiritually, and in all other ways, impoverished. He refused to give her his blessing.

We'd decided on a civil ceremony, in Ames. He was convinced her decision to be married outside the church, outside
his
church—he communicated this to Sara through her mother—was intended as an insult to him. He didn't come to the wedding. After we were married, he would not talk to Sara at all. (It was only six years later, when Sara told her mother she was pregnant, that he spoke to her again.) He attempted to prevent Sara's mother and siblings from going to the wedding, insisting that their presence would constitute a flagrant betrayal of him. For what might have been the first time in their conjugal life, Sara's mother opposed him. She came to the ceremony in Ames, and brought with her Sara's brother and sister. It was not an easy or joyous occasion for her or for Sara's siblings, but they were there with us. I was grateful to her then, and I would have further reason for gratitude. When Sara and I moved to New Hampshire, her mother gave us, as a housewarming present, the down payment, and considerably more than that, for the house in Lebanon. This, as we were to understand, without her husband's approval or knowledge. Similarly, all the money Sara came into upon reaching the age of twenty-one—more money than we could conceivably spend—derived from a long-standing, generation-skipping trust established by her mother's side of the family. This was money over which her father had no say, and it was this aspect of Sara's inheritance, about which money I felt some misguided and prideful ambivalence, that allowed me to reconcile myself to what a chimp could have seen was my great good fortune. Sara's father disowned her. We received gratuitously formal notice from his attorney.

While she waited for me to finish my degree, and though we didn't need the money, Sara worked the day shift as a waitress at the faculty club. Later, in New Hampshire, she would work at a local stable, mucking stalls, grooming and exercising the horses, giving an occasional lesson, and at a wholesale greenhouse, tending to the plants. She said she enjoyed earning a wage, enjoyed this kind of work.

For the seven years we were married, she persisted in loving me as if I was worthy of her love. From the start, I suspected she was determined to prove to her father . . . what, exactly? That she had picked the right man? That she could love someone of whom he didn't approve, someone he didn't like? That, given her choice, she would choose a man radically unlike him? That, unlike him, her capacity for love was such that she would love as fully and as generously as she could—I can tell you it was glorious to be loved by her—whomever she chose? That
her
love was not contingent? (This, I think, is reductive, making her feelings for me all about her father, and does her a disservice.) I think it is truer to say she could love no other way. My luck.

For her sake only, I bemoan each uninspiring, ungracious, ordinary minute she spent with me.

 

The last time I'd done a thorough job of it, my heart stopped, so I resisted the impulse to clean the house. I didn't know how long it would be once Anna arrived before we'd be setting off for Montreal, but, as she was the last one to sleep in them, I didn't change the sheets on the guest room bed. I wiped off the toilet and the tub, put out some fresh towels, sprayed some scent.

I had a vague idea I might take something of Sara's with me. I walked around the house, making ready, room by room, to leave it. The truth was, I needed no memento, no tangible thing, to help me remember her. I thought about saying good-bye to the twins next door, Sophie and Marie. Those pale, enigmatic daisies. If they were enigmatic, it was only because I knew nothing about little girls. By the time they reached my classroom, they were young women. As I faced the imminent prospect of leaving the house once and for all, I was surprised to find how much the twins meant to me, how much I'd miss them. I'd watched them play outside my window, watched them sprout, from the time they were infants, though I wasn't sure how old they were now and could never tell them apart.