The Bradbury Report (23 page)

“It was wrong of me,” she said. “I know that.”

“You hear about nurses doing that sort of thing for their male patients, the invalids, the terminal cases. Angels of mercy.”

“It's not the same. I shouldn't have done it. I'm not sure why I did. The poor boy didn't know what was happening to him.”

“You gave him a little pleasure,” I said. “You brought him some relief.”

“I don't know that I did,” she said. “I hope you won't judge me too harshly.”

“I don't judge you at all.”

“What does that mean?” she said.

“It means, I'm grateful for your company.”

“It's my fault you're here in the first place.”

“True. But, as I'm here, I'm glad you're with me.”

“That makes no sense,” she said.

“I know what I mean.”

“Anyway,” she said, smiling, obviously unburdened, “don't get any ideas.”

“That's the second time you've said that to me.”

“Which reminds me,” she said. “I want to tell you something. When I found out that you and Sara had been married . . .”

“How did you find out?”

“Sara told me. She wrote me.”

“I didn't know that,” I said. “Good. It's good she did that.”

“I have to say,” she said, “when I found out, I was sorry. Though I liked you, Ray, you know I liked you, I felt Sara might have done better.”

“She could have,” I said. “There's no doubt about that. I agree with you.”

“I'm not saying this to be cruel,” she said. “I just wonder what it means about me, that I could have felt that way and still have wanted you for myself. In whatever way I wanted you, which I don't think I really knew. But I was happy for you guys when I heard. I was married by then. Even if I wasn't, I would have been happy for you. You should have invited me. I don't think I would have come. I don't know. Maybe I would have.”

That night, though I was well-fed and bone tired and longing for sleep, with Anna in the room, in a bed so near mine, sleep, as it had the night before, eluded me. I don't believe I slept at all until after four. It was Sunday. We had a lazy morning. We slept in, which was lucky for me, ate no breakfast, and didn't really get going until just
before lunch, which we had in a tiny café called Titanic. I remember the name because it seemed, both, so witty and so hopeless. Afterwards, Anna wanted to do some sightseeing. I agreed to see one sight with her. On a piece of hotel stationery she'd written a list, culled from a guidebook she'd bought in Iowa, of things she wanted to see in Montreal. She proposed the Basilique Notre Dame. I had been there with Sara, but I remembered nothing about the church. It was, in the way of such things, big, splendid, gaudy, cold. Sara was always anxious in churches, no matter the size or grandness, and it's likely we hadn't stayed long. When Anna and I arrived, sometime near one o'clock, there were few visitors. We had to pay to get in. We made a desultory circuit of the interior. It was hard to know what we were supposed to look at. We'd made our way back to the narthex. I thought we were ready to leave, but Anna said, “Give me a minute.”

“What for?”

“Just give me a minute,” she said, and I watched as she walked quickly up the central aisle through the nave towards the chancel. Anna slipped into a pew near the front. She sat for a few minutes—I could just see the back of her head—then came back down the aisle, her head slightly bowed, the posture and the walk unmistakable. Watching her it came to me—news, I'm sure, only to me—that the word “prayer” can be used to denote what is prayed and the person who prays it.

“You were praying,” I said.

“Yes. Do you mind?”

“No. Did you put in a word for me?”

“I did,” she said. “I always do.”

When we got back to the Bonsecours it was midafternoon. A large manila envelope had been left for Jane Grey at the reception desk. My driver's license and passport, under the name Oliver Grey, were inside, along with a hand-drawn street map and a note giving us our instructions. We were to leave Montreal the next day at noon. We were to drive west to Ottawa, making no stops, and, at precisely three o'clock, show up at the address given. The note stipulated that Anna was to do the driving, which stipulation, a deliberate insult, I was determined we would not heed.

Sunday night, our last in Montreal, after an early dinner, during which neither of us spoke about the next day, we returned to the hotel and packed our bags. It was the right time, Anna said, for her to brief me on what it was like for a clone inside the Clearances. What it would have been like for my clone. I told her I was sleepy. She said I wasn't sleepy, that I'd slept most of the day. With that, the idyll, such as it was, ended, and class began.

“From the start of the government's program,” Anna said, “as I believe I've told you, we have tried to think, as near as we could come to it, the way the government thinks. All the evidence points to thinking that is pragmatic, self-interested, and venal, but who can be sure how the government thinks? All I can tell you is what seems to us the most probable of what has been guessed, deduced, imagined. We believe we have come close to the truth.”

Although I had slept most of the day, I
was
tired. My feet hurt. My scalp itched. I was worried about my heart. I wanted to be in bed, in the dark, alone in the room. I wanted to think about things—however beside the point—without Anna's voice in my head. Why did I need to know this? I would meet the clone. I would see what I would see. I would do what I could for him. I would stand beside Anna. If I still saw the reason for it, I would write the report.

“Everything within the Clearances,” she told me, “the most densely populated area on earth, is designed and engineered to keep the clones physically healthy and emotionally placid, to keep them manageable and docile, without the instinct or means for procreation, or self-preservation, or aggression. Every day the clones get long bouts of regimented exercise, though there is no game-playing, no sports, no activity that might encourage a spirit of collaboration or teamwork, nothing to inspire a collective sense. They get an optimally balanced, low-calorie, inexpensively delivered diet. They eat vegetables and fruits grown on the Clearances by the clones themselves. They eat very little meat, and no red meat. The poultry and pork they eat is from pigs and fowl raised inside the Clearances. The fish, too, is farmed there. No sweets. No coffee or tea; nothing that might jazz
them up. Plenty of water. Wholegrain breads. A glass of purple grape juice with supper. They eat the way we might eat if our one concern was maximum health and longevity. So that, on average, the health of the clones is far better than that of their originals. It is certain,” Anna said, “that the government cares far more about the health of the clones than it does about the health of its citizens, in whom it has little investment.

“As long as they live, adult male clones are administered daily a massive and uniform course of psychotropic drugs meant to keep them subdued, oblivious of sex (homoerotic), well-rested, and not discontent. I'm sure my group will have analyzed samples of blood taken from your clone, and will know the nature and extent of this medication. In any case,” Anna said, “I have witnessed the horrific emotional and physical effects of its withdrawal.

“At birth, each clone is tattooed on the inside of his left forearm, with what appears to be a scannable identification number. Though it is not, in fact, scannable, at least not with any of the equipment we tried, the number simply and unmistakably identifies the clone with its original.”

One way or another I already knew this, and I told her so.

“Clones are not given names,” she said, “just these ID codes. They live in enormous prefabricated hangar-like structures, barracks, each of which houses ten thousand clones.”

“That number can't be anything but arbitrary,” I said.

“Our best guess,” she said.

“Adult male clones and adult female clones never see one another; the male and female barracks are set hundreds of miles apart. The clones are warehoused, inventoried, grouped by age, according not to
their
date of birth, which might vary some from those of their barracks-mates, but to the birth date of their original. Before he got out, however that happened, your clone lived with other male clones whose originals were all were born on November 23, 2004.”

“You remember my birthday?”

“When you need a part, your clone is easy to locate.”

“He's not now,” I said.

“When the male clones have finished their exercise and their work, whatever that is, for the day, they are sedated. Either they are working, exercising, eating, or they are sleeping.”

“What does your group think?” I said, without facetiousness. “Do clones dream?”

“I can tell you they do,” Anna said. “At least when they are coming off drugs.

“That the clones do not have names, that there are so many of them in any one ‘residence,' that they have no ‘free' time—we don't have the language to describe this universe—would certainly discourage,” she said, “if not absolutely prevent, anything that resembles social interaction.

“When they reach the age of twelve or thirteen, male clones are put to work. Some do agricultural work on farms inside the Clearances. Some work at the cleaning and upkeep of the buildings and grounds. Some do road and infrastructure repair. Some see to the maintenance of vehicles and equipment. Some prepare the food. And some are involved in the process of cloning itself, so contrived that the fewest possible originals need be connected with it.

“Female clones require very little medication to keep them pacific and are not sedated at night. They do only one sort of work: they carry and give birth to infant clones, and they nurse them and care for them through infancy and childhood. The process is designed to obliterate the dangerous mother-child bond. Each female nurses and tends to a different child each day. An infant clone might, on any given day or night, be assigned to one of ten thousand ‘mothers' who reside in a particular ‘rearing' complex. As the clones are not named, the transient mother would call her charge ‘Boy' or ‘Girl' (or some version thereof in the language given the clones to use), and the child, when he or she was old enough, would use the appellation ‘Nurse.' We find some comfort,” Anna said, “in the belief that, under even the most severe and harassing of circumstances, the maternal instinct will prove irrepressible, and that a certain portion of mother-love, of tenderness and kindness, could not be rigged out of the situation.

“Among the clones, children have no fathers. This will be important
for you to keep in mind, Ray. The boy clones have no interaction with adult males, until they leave the world of female clones. The girl clones never in their lives see an adult male.

“Artificial means of inducing and sustaining lactation, and of delaying menopause, will have been developed. When she is no longer able to give birth, the female clone is shifted to the care of young clones, between the ages of three and thirteen. After which, clones are no longer considered children. The male clones are moved to residences for adult males and committed to adult male work. At the age of twelve or thirteen, the female clone's life is given over, for as many as forty years, exclusively to child-bearing. She becomes an incubator, a factory for producing babies. When she is not having them, she is nursing them (though never her ‘own'). She is almost continuously pregnant, with a respite between pregnancies just long enough to prevent the process from becoming life-threatening.”

I understood, and Anna was at some pains to make this clear, that when she spoke about what went on inside the Clearances, she was dealing almost entirely in speculation, however reasoned and astute it might have been. For instance: this conception of the life of a female clone had to be, at this point in the history of the enterprise, purely speculative, as the first generation of clones, of which my clone was a member, was just now reaching adulthood. Still, when she spoke this way, declaratively, authoritatively, using the present tense as she did, it was hard to keep from taking speculation for fact.

And I wondered if she, and her group, were afflicted by the same confusion. “If a female clone is pregnant, and her original needs a part, the extraction of which would jeopardize her life and, perhaps, that of the fetus, the original is given a compatible part from a store of spare parts frozen and warehoused for this purpose, and allowed to believe it comes from
her
clone. Except in the most extraordinary cases, the babies are delivered by clone midwives (who train by watching other clone midwives). Pain medication is liberally administered; the notion of natural childbirth is irrelevant. Caesarean sections are rare. For emergencies, and for serious illnesses, the government operates within the Clearances' two hundred and fifty hospitals—we estimate
one for every million clones—staffed by doctors and nurses and support personnel taken from the U.S. military, and sworn to the strictest secrecy.”