The Bradbury Report (13 page)

Authors: Steven Polansky

BOOK: The Bradbury Report

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(My heart sags as I write this. There is no way to protect them. They will be easy to find.)

No. This must be in the report. Whatever else there is, Ray, this must be in it. Boldface.
My children, my grandchildren, know nothing about any of this. They know nothing of my activities. They are not involved. They have no part in it. I have told them nothing. None of my children, or my grandchildren, knows anything. After I disappear, I will not communicate with them. When you come for me, they will not know where I have gone.

The man who called that evening was one of the group. I did not recognize his voice, and, the way things are structured, I'm sure I would not know him if we passed each other on the street. He said, “Hello, Anna. This is Jimmy Valentine.” I knew exactly what that meant. A clone had been found. However minuscule the chances of this ever happening, an elaborate code and set of procedures was in place, and I was well versed in
them. I said back, “Hello, you, mister,” which was the pre-scripted prompt, meant to let him know I was in the game and had my wits about me. Then he said, “What are we having for dinner?” Which meant they would, contingent on my next response, be bringing the clone to me sometime soon. “Your favorite,” I said. “Grilled pork chops,” which told him I understood the question (“glazed,” if I hadn't), “with applesauce,” which signified I was willing and prepared to receive the clone (“with horseradish,” if I wasn't). “Yum,” he said. “I'll be there in four shakes,” meaning the clone would be delivered the following day at eight p.m. “I'll keep it warm for you,” I said, which requires no gloss. He said, “That's my girl,” which confirmed the transaction and ended the conversation.

The local texture of our work against cloning might be foolish and overwrought, but the work is noble and necessary. I believe it is God's work, and I am not a “true believer,” not in God, or even in the work. You must understand, Ray, the danger of the most minor indiscretion or nonchalance, to us as individuals and as a group, is real and potentially ruinous.

It is interesting. You expect never, never expect, to get the call. No matter how earnestly you prepare for it, you know the chances of the call ever coming, to you or anyone else, are virtually none. Then it comes. You answer it, and it is “Jimmy Valentine.” The instant you say, “Hello, you, mister,” consenting to your part in the action, the political, subversive, revolutionary action, you step extravagantly out of the only world you have known till then. You get the call, and a hatch in the floor opens like a gallows trap. You fall through, and your life is utterly changed. I heard the unknown voice on the other end say, “Jimmy Valentine,” and I gave all the right responses. When the call was done I felt calm and outside myself. This is what is happening to me, I thought. This is who I am now, and what I do. Something like that. I had much farther to fall.

I have to believe there were other people in the group living near enough to where the clone was found who might have been called on to receive the clone, provide him with food and shelter, and for a week or so (it turned out to be six days) attend to his immediate physical and emotional needs. We are widely dispersed along the perimeter of the Clearances, among villages and towns in Iowa and Nebraska and Wyoming and Montana and
Minnesota. There aren't very many of us all told, three thousand tops, and sparse few in any one area. We don't know one another, or only one or two others. This is a function both of geographical circumstance, and design. We don't do much, besides watch and wait and, in a studiously uncoordinated way, badger our congressmen. An anonymous anti-cloning newsletter, called
Original Sin,
is published monthly on the Web, but I'd bet we are the only ones who read it. Even I don't read it very often. It doesn't much change, one issue to the next.

I suspect they wanted a woman for the job. Someone in my group would have been aware my husband had recently died, and that I was living alone, inconspicuously. The local operatives (I don't know what else to call them; we don't know what to call ourselves) knew, too, I'd raised three children, and probably felt I could be counted on to nurse the clone through the rigors of withdrawal. I was a longtime member of the group. My husband was instrumental at its beginning. Maybe they thought, by calling me, to honor him.

As I mean to do.

I spent the next day laying in provisions I thought I might need taking care of the clone. I had no idea what kind of shape he'd be in, what I'd wind up doing for him. I hadn't yet been told how old he was or how long I'd have him. I bought basic stuff, staples: meat, vegetables, fruit, cheese, bread, eggs, juice, cereal, rice. I bought two pints of chocolate chocolate-chip ice cream, and some real maple syrup, in case I made him pancakes. I picked up some first-aid supplies: rubbing alcohol, cotton pads, bandages, adhesive tape, anti-inflammatory tablets, hydrocortisone and antibiotic creams, antacid tablets, a bottle of milk of magnesia, an emetic, laxatives, over-the-counter sedatives and painkillers. I already had a fair sampling of this stuff on hand, but figured I might need more. I bought a toothbrush and toothpaste for him, shampoo, deodorant, body wash, a comb and a brush (and a bowl full of mush), a razor and shaving gel and aftershave, trying to replicate the toiletries my husband used.

I enjoyed shopping for the clone. I wanted him to have new, fresh things. Except for visits from my children, who were tender and solicitous, and my grandchildren, who were tonic, I'd not had a guest in the house since my husband died.

My husband's clothes were all clean, hung neatly in his closet, or folded and put away in his dresser drawers. I'd seen to that soon after his death. My husband was such a big man. I couldn't imagine the clone would be able to wear much of his stuff, but I got out a robe and some underwear and socks and pajamas. I tried my best to anticipate the clone's needs. As it happened, very little I did to prepare for his stay with me was of any real use. Pretty much all I'd need would be diapers and wipes, and those I didn't think to get.

The next evening at seven I backed my husband's truck out of the garage, drove it around town for a few minutes, then parked it on the street in front of the house. I left the garage door open, the garage light off, these machinations all pre-arranged. Outside it would be light, still, for an hour or more, but I closed the drapes all through the house. Then I sat down in the living room with a raspberry tart and a cup of tea and waited. I thought about my husband. I think about him as I write this. What would he say about what I'm about to do? What would he advise?

His kidneys had failed. We could not pay for dialysis. Our decision, more than twenty years ago, not to have ourselves cloned, meant that we were able to get only minimal insurance, and that my husband was not eligible for a transplant, unless he could, on his own, find a compatible kidney. He'd made his peace with this; I had not. I begged the doctor to take a kidney from me, but in this way only were my husband and I incompatible. He insisted we not tell the kids he was dying until it was too late for them to be of use as donors. (Am I willing, ready, to die for this cause? As he did? It seems I am.)

Just before eight o'clock, I stood at the kitchen window, looking out over the front yard through a split in the curtains. I'd left the kitchen dark so I could see without my being seen. A car stopped in the street directly opposite the house, idled a moment, then came slowly up the driveway. It was an ordinary car, small, Chinese. It was light enough out that I could see there were three men in the car, the driver and two men in the backseat. The car pulled into the garage. I heard the garage door shut. I turned on the kitchen light. I opened the kitchen door, which communicated with the garage down a small set of stairs. From inside the kitchen I turned on the overhead light in the garage. I remained in the kitchen and looked down
into the garage. The garage light seemed unusually harsh. The driver got of the car and came around it to the passenger side, the side nearest me. I didn't know him, as I knew I would not. He was short and bearded, younger than I, in his early forties, I supposed. He looked up at me. He did not smile. A huge, leathery moth was flapping around the garage light. The driver asked me to turn off the light, which I did. Those were the last words he would say. He opened the rear door of the car on the passenger side. The car's interior light went on, but faintly. The man inside the car closest to the passenger side door, I now could see, was the clone. He looked to be asleep, or dead. He was motionless, his arms limp at his side, his head thrown back, his neck stretched tight, his mouth open. I could not see his face. The man in the car sitting beside the clone worked with the driver as he, the driver, took hold of the clone by both ankles and began to slide the clone, feet first, out of the car. The clone appeared to be inert. It was clear he would not be able to move or stand under his own power. He was unconscious and did not visibly react to anything done to him. The man inside the car positioned himself so that the clone's head rested on his lap. Then the clone was out of the car, the driver holding him by the ankles, the other man holding him underneath the arms. As if he were a strip of sod. They stood him up. They were neither rough nor gentle with the clone, merely expeditious. The clone's head sagged, and all I could see was the top of his head. When he had got the clone's feet set flat on the ground, the driver, the smaller of the two men, let go of the clone's ankles. He put his shoulder to the clone's midsection and lifted the clone, draping him over his shoulder. Carrying him like that, the clone's head hanging upside down behind him, he brought the clone up into the kitchen. The other man followed, shutting the door as he came through. He was older than his comrade (my comrade, too), my age perhaps, tall and thin and nearly bald. I noticed his hands, which were scarily large and long-fingered, as if he were acromegalic. His head, too, was disproportionately large and bony.

We did not speak. It was as if we'd been told to keep silent, or beforehand had agreed not to talk, neither of which was the case. I led them out of the kitchen and up the stairs to the guest room, which I had prepared for the clone's arrival. I'd made up the bed with clean sheets and pillow slips, emptied the drawers in the painted dresser, even put a vase of cut flowers on
the night table. (What did I imagine I was doing?) The shades were drawn, and the room was unlit, except for a nightlight in the shape of an angel I'd plugged into the wall beside the dresser. The nightlight had been my daughter's. The room had been her room. The driver, still carrying the clone, stooped and, with the help of the taller man, let the clone fall onto the bed, laying him face up on top of the bedclothes before I had a chance to pull them back.

It was my first opportunity really to look at the clone. Our recent thinking was that a clone's daily uniform would be designed to coincide with the current mode of everyday dress in the towns and villages bordering the Clearances, modified when necessary to keep pace with trends in local fashion. (In Iowa, fashionwise, we are ten years behind the coasts.) So that should the impossible occur and the clone find himself, or be found, outside the Clearances, there would be nothing visual to distinguish him as a clone. I don't know what he was wearing when they found him. By the time he was brought to my house, our clone, your clone, did look like most any young man in his early twenties in rural Iowa in the middle of summer. He had on a pair of blue jeans, white socks, and white running shoes, which were brand-new. Someone had put him in a white cotton T-shirt, whichâthe only anomalyâhad long sleeves, in order, I assume, to cover the code on the inside of his left forearm. They had cleaned him up, and maybe even given him a haircut. His hair was short. He was clean-shaven. His fingernails were clean and trimmed. When you looked at him, there was nothing to cause you to suspect you might be looking at a clone.

I knew, at once, it was you. Your clone. The moment I saw him on my daughter's bed, I did not make the distinction. I was looking at you. It was you, Ray, a bit bigger than I remembered you, broader in the chest, a touch leaner in the face, but there was no doubt it was you. I had gotten old, along with everyone else, and you had remained exactly as you were when I knew you forty-five years ago. It was the only way I'd ever known you. I had not seen you age. So there was no chance I might have misremembered you. It was you. It was disorienting, shocking. Terrifying. At the moment of recognition, I was, all at once, overcome with griefâfor everything, in that instant, I felt I'd lost seeing you still young. Time collapsed. It was as if, suddenly, seeing
you, I'd lost my husband again. As if I'd had no husband, no children. I was, at once, embarrassed by how old I was, by how old I looked, by how old I would look, now, to you. I was, at once, furious about how young you looked. I was envious. I was not, then, angry you had a clone. I am now. Disappointed. Not surprised. At that moment, looking down at you, I missed you terribly. I felt guilty, treacherous, missing you. It's been two weeks, and I am still in shock.

I must have blanched, or gasped. The tall man looked at me. “What is it?” he said. He said this in a kindly way.

“I know him,” I said.

“You know him?” he said.

“I know who this is.”

“This is a clone,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Do you mean you know the original?”

“Yes,” I said. “I mean that.”

The driver looked at me but didn't speak. The tall man shook his head. “Christ,” he said. “How is that possible?”

“I don't know,” I said.