The Bradbury Report (22 page)

Anna came out of the bookstore lugging a shopping bag. I closed the bible. I was happy to see her.

“What have
you
got?” I said. I held the bible up before me as if it were one of the tablets indited with the Decalogue. “Top this.”

“Very impressive,” she said. “What came over you?”

“I felt I had better buy something. It's a beautiful book. You should look at it.”

“I will look at it,” she said. “I bought books for the clone. What a great store. I could have stayed in there all morning. Let's find someplace to sit, and I'll show you what I've got.”

Two doors down, we found a green metal bench, unoccupied and large enough for two, set in the boulevard beneath a thick-leaved and fragrant tree.

“It's nice here,” Anna said. She put the shopping bag between us on the bench. “Smell that,” she said. “This is a lovely city. If I'd lived where you live, I'd have come up here a lot.”

“I should have,” I said.

“Let me show you,” she said, and, one by one, she produced the books she had bought, praising each. (Anna kept a scrupulous account of all purchases she made with the money her group had given her.)

What she'd got were books she intended to read to, and perhaps with, the clone, books she meant to use in her capacity as his teacher. (As she understood it, in addition to keeping the clone alive and safe, this was a critical part of her charge.) These were all old books, books she had loved as a child, books her mother had read to her, books her mother had, herself, known as a child. Over the years, Anna had read and reread these books. Then she'd read them again to
her
sons and
daughter, often reading from the same copies, copies she'd lovingly conserved, that had been read to her and to her mother before her. There were
Peter Pan
,
The Water Babies
,
Oliver Twist
and
Great Expectations
,
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
,
Wind in the Willows
,
Winnie the Pooh
,
Pinocchio
,
The Prince and the Pauper
,
Adam Bede
,
Uncle Wiggily's Story Book
,
The Mouse and His Child
, a volume of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales, the first two books of
The Boxcar Children
series,
The Secret Garden
,
James and the Giant Peach
,
The Adventures of Lucky Pup
. I would get used to seeing these books around in the various apartments we rented. Most of them I didn't know. Anna assured me they were all “great books.” Her plan, she said, was to use them to help teach the clone to read—should he need to be taught—and to help him acquire the language, should that be necessary, as, so far, it appeared it would be. (What Anna, too cagily for my taste, didn't mention was this: her group's long-term intention for the clone; that he become a presentable spokesman for their anti-cloning agenda. She saw, as I did—as the clone would come ultimately to see—the radical cruelty in exploiting the clone this way, asking him, shaping him to speak out against his own existence.)

After she'd shown me the books she'd bought, I wondered aloud what good they would do the clone, who, after all, was not a child, even assuming he'd ever be able to understand the language in which they were written, and who, more than anything else, would need to learn about the world as it was, not as it was imagined in the out-of-date fantasies Anna had assembled. What we, and he, would need, I said, were books that graphically explained the actual world and helped him locate himself in it. For the purposes of language acquisition and reading skills, I had in mind books for beginning readers, with a limited and repetitive text, and lots of illustration. To teach him the names of all the things and creatures he might never have seen, I suggested a word book or two—by which I meant those books that have, on every page, a hundred drawings of things, with the name for each thing printed beneath it—and a paperback dictionary of the English language. I suspected we'd want simple primary school textbooks in arithmetic, and science, and social studies. A comprehensive atlas
of the world would be helpful, and some text, at whatever level, full of color plates, on anatomy and physiology. I thought the clone would be better served by books of this explanatory, denominating, more explicitly didactical sort. I did not press the point—my opinions were based on almost no knowledge of the clone—but I was proved right.

When he joined us in Ottawa, the clone had only a minimal number of English words, with which he could generate a minimal number of short, simple sentences in the declarative, interrogative, and, less frequently, imperative modes: “I want to eat.” “When can I eat?” “Feed me.” (In truth, I can't imagine him saying that last. He was a good eater but always patient and passive about mealtimes.) We didn't know whether he'd been taught to form these sentences, inside the Clearances, or whether he'd picked them up in the short time he'd been out. In either case, it was clear the government had developed some means—perhaps by keeping them sedated half the time—of preventing or, at the very least, stunting the development of language among the clones. He could not read, and had never been read to. He had no notion of reading, or of books. In the year he was with us he would be very quick to understand language spoken to him. He was slower, but still quick to acquire a speaking vocabulary and a facility with grammar and syntax. (In writing of the clone's aptitudes, there is no way for me to avoid the appearance of self-congratulation.) Despite Anna's best efforts—she was, I saw, a skillful and dedicated teacher—he still hasn't learned to read beyond, say, fifth-grade level. He was miserable trying to learn to write (as I had been)—nothing we asked of him made him angrier—and Anna was satisfied when he could print his name.

At eleven, we went into Centaur Office Supplies. To the first employee we came upon Anna identified us as Bud and Jane Grey. He seemed to understand and, without any delay, led us to the back of the store where, in a small space behind a curtain, another man took my picture. When Anna offered to pay, they assured her, in English, they'd already been paid. By this time I had begun to flag. We took a cab back to the Bonsecours, and ate a quick, light lunch in a cafeteria across from the hotel. After lunch, I went up to the room to nap.
Anna came up with me, stayed long enough to freshen up, then went down to explore the city at her own pace.

 

I was still asleep when Anna came back to the room, sometime after five. I'd pulled the shade down, and the room was stuffy and dark. I was not at all ready to wake up, but Anna, making no effort to be quiet, raised the shade with a snap and opened the window, letting in the air and the noise from the street.

I was not happy to be rousted this way. “What's going on? What are you doing?”

“I've come back,” she said.

“I'll say.”

“Because I want to talk.”

“I'm asleep.”

“I need to talk, Ray, please. You're all I have.”

“All right. Will you let me go to the bathroom? I'll be right back.”

“Go ahead,” she said. She sat down on her bed to wait.

I took my time in the bathroom. When I came out I sat down on the edge of my bed and faced her. “Some things take longer now,” I said.

“I see.”

“So. Talk.”

“Don't be that way,” she said.

“Sorry. I meant: ‘Let's talk.' What is it you want to talk about?”

She stood up and walked over to the club chair, on which, before leaving for her walk, she'd deposited her shopping bag. She took out several of the books. “These are wonderful books, Ray. My mother read them to me.” She named the books in her hand. “Her mother read them to her. I read them to my children.”

“Yes, you told me.”

“I know I did. Just listen. I don't want to read them to the clone. That's not who I want to read them to. I want to read them to my grandchildren. I've been waiting to read them to my grandchildren. I've been looking forward to that. You can't imagine how much I've looked forward to that.”

“I can't,” I said. “You're right.”

“This is not about you, Ray. All right? Can this not be about you?”

“It can.”

“I miss my kids,” she said. “I miss their kids. Sweet little things. I want them. I want to read these books to them.”

“I'm sure you do,” I said, trying my best to be compassionate.

“Will I see them again?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I mean, how would I know? I don't know anything. Except what you tell me. You tell me. Will you see them again?”

“I don't know,” she said. She was silent a moment. She put the books back in the bag. “Maybe I will.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. I
was
sorry.

She sat down again on the bed. “What am I doing here?” she said. “What am I doing?”

“I don't know, Anna,” I said. “I mean, if you don't know, I certainly don't. Shall we go home?”

I believe she gave this possibility some thought. Then: “No,” she said. “No. We can't go home.”

“We can't? Or we won't?”

“Both,” she said. “Neither. Be easy on me, Ray. I'm sad. I'm coming apart.”

“What can I do?” I said. “I don't know what to do.”

“Just be quiet for a minute. Let me sit quietly.”

I was glad to do that.

After a while, she said. “We can't go home.”

“I believe you,” I said, though I didn't quite believe her. Whatever
she
might or might not be able to do, I believed I could still go home, that if, for me, a point of no return existed, I had not yet gone past it.

That night at dinner Anna said to me, “They will be after me sooner than they will be after you. I am known to them. Known to be in opposition to their program, known to be part of a dissident group, known to live at the edge of the Clearances. They will figure out I am involved with the clone long before they even begin to consider the possibility
that you might be with me. Depending on when I am found, there might still be a chance for you to escape, and continue.”

“With the clone, by myself?”

“If that is how it goes,” she said. “Yes.”

“I don't think I could do that, Anna. I don't think I would.”

“You'd have to. You'd have no choice.”

“I could let him go.”

“You couldn't do that, Ray.”

When I said this, I had not yet met the clone.

“Listen,” I said. “Here's one thing I can do. I can take you to dinner. Would that be good?”

She smiled at me. “That's sweet, Ray. Can we go someplace nice?”

With a cheap and easy gallantry, already thinking about getting back to the room after dinner and going to sleep, I said, “We can go anywhere you like. So long as I don't have to walk there.”

“Can we dress up?” she said.

“I'll do what I can.”

On her afternoon walk Anna had seen a restaurant in Old Montreal she thought looked good.

“We'll go there,” I said.

“I looked at the menu in the window. It's awfully expensive.”

“It will be fine,” I said.

It was Saturday night, but we showed up early enough to get a table without a reservation. It was a spectacular place—a two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old stable that at obvious cost and attention to detail had been converted to an elegant and very expensive restaurant—dark wood, exposed beams, starched white tablecloths, fine china and silver and crystal. Candlelight. The waiters expert. The space was large, but someone had given careful thought to the disposition of the tables and to the acoustics, so that although most all the tables were full, the dining room felt intimate and hushed. Anna had put on a sleeveless linen sundress with a vertical green and white stripe that made her look even taller than she was. (The dress had a special resonance for me. I'd bought one very like it once for Sara.) She was wearing makeup, lipstick and eyeliner and the like. If she had worn it before, I hadn't noticed.
I had on a short-sleeve plaid sport shirt and khakis. I have always dressed the way I remember my father dressing. I'd brought two sport coats with me to Canada, both wool, a glen plaid and a navy blazer, and I carried the blazer over my arm.

When we'd been seated, I said, “Your French is pretty good.”

“I had it in high school,” she said. “I'm butchering it.”

“They seem to understand you.”

“Yes, because they all speak English.”

At dinner, Anna did most of the talking. I thought perhaps she talked as much as she did—then, and at most other times—as a way to stave off grief and despair. That night, she was more voluble even than usual.

“This place is amazing,” she said. “I've never been in a restaurant this fancy. Have you?”

“Maybe once or twice.”

“With Sara?”

“It would have been with Sara, yes.”

“Well, it's lovely here,” she said. “I feel glamorous and rich. Thank you for taking me.”

She talked again about her husband, and about the trips they had taken together. Conspicuously, she did not speak about her children. I knew she was trying to avoid the pain of that. At some point in the meal, she turned serious and dark. She looked at me across the table. “In the car, yesterday,” she said, “you didn't respond when I told you what I'd done for the clone.”

I had not been thinking about this. “I didn't know how to respond,” I said. “When I read your journal, I assumed that's what it was.”