The Bradbury Report (26 page)

 

It is right here, at the moment in which Alan opened his eyes and looked at me, and I looked back and saw him, really, for the first time, that I am, in this report, most at risk of serving the interests, the polemical purposes of Anna's group. What I write here, now, more than a year after the event, about my initial response to seeing my clone, Alan, to inhabiting with him the selfsame spot in space and time, will for them stand and serve as the very heart of my report, its reason for being. My reason for being, too, so far as they are concerned. It is probable I am the only human being to have been brought face to face with his clone. To say it another way: it is probable I am the only human being ever to come face to face with a significantly younger, but identical copy of himself, made by the government, with his knowledge and consent, and to have survived long enough to speak of it. To stand and look at his clone, and to be looked at by him, simultaneously to see, and be seen by, himself, as he was, forty-five years in the past.

Alan opened his eyes. He looked at me, though fleetingly and with much less interest than I brought to the exchange. To him I was just another older man, and, as such—the Tall Man was right about this—threatening and unwanted. Not just another older man. I believe he felt, at the start, a special enmity for me. He would have been able to tell right off I had a prior relationship with Anna, a prior claim. I was in the way of his desire to be alone with and close to her. It is one thing—though not an easy thing, I can tell you—to look backward and see yourself as a young man. Quite another, to look forward in time. He would have had no idea who I was. He could not, and did not, see himself in me, which was merciful. Imagine how it would feel, at twenty-one, to see standing before you the old man you would become. Your doom.

He was sitting on the couch. His hands were still folded in his lap. He looked frightened to me. Confused. Perhaps I imagined he was frightened and confused because if I'd been him, that's how I'd have felt. Perhaps he was merely bored. Or numb. Or calculating his chances of overpowering us and making his escape.

Standing there, looking at a facsimile of myself at twenty-one, I felt a sort of ecstasy, a feeling of standing outside myself. I did not speak to him. “Hello there. I'm Ray, your original. Glad to meet you. I mean you no harm.” I suppose I might have said exactly that. I said nothing, nor, no surprise, did he.

Alan was wearing a dark green, long-sleeved polo shirt, unbuttoned at the neck, a pair of loose-fitting blue jeans, white socks, and white running shoes. All of it brand-new. He was wearing a baseball cap, one of those replicas, with the old Montreal Expos logo on it. I remember feeling sad, looking at that hat, to think he had never played, or even watched, baseball. Later that day, right before the clone went to bed, Anna got him to take off his cap. It was she, in fact, who, after telling him what she was about to do, took hold of the brim and very carefully lifted it off his head, as if the top of his skull was a soufflé she didn't want to disturb. He made no motion to resist. He was surprised to see the hat come away in her hands; it seemed he hadn't known he was wearing it. I noticed, then, that he parted his hair on the right. I have always parted my hair on the left. (I still have most of my hair, though it has thinned and lately gone all gray.) I wondered why Alan's hair seemed to lie, naturally, in the opposite direction. I wondered, further, if all these years I'd been parting my hair on the wrong side, combing it against the grain. There was no question it looked better the way Alan combed it, and I resolved—could I have been more fatuous?—when things settled down, to try it his way.

I'd had plenty of time to envision this meeting, and my clone. I'd read Anna's journal and listened to her talk on the subject. Though I should have known what to expect, I was surprised to discover, at this first glance, that Alan was absolutely indistinguishable from an original (I could come up with no other way to say this), that
nothing about him visible to me betrayed him as a copy. He was much better looking than I was at his age. That was immediately clear. As Anna had observed, he was broader than I'd been, and certainly more muscular. His face was more angular, his features better defined, the skin on his face clear and soft. His eyes were mine, I thought, and his mouth.

Taking him in, I was struck, vertiginous—such that my knees almost gave way—and deeply saddened by how young he was. He looked new, as if he'd just been made. He was, I would have said, shiny. It turned out—sometime later, when he was less hostile towards me, Anna got us to stand back to back—he was also an inch taller.

I wanted to see him with his clothes off. My belly had never been flat. My arms and legs and shoulders were strong enough, but never muscly. I'd told myself I wasn't programmed for definition. I wanted to see his belly. I wanted to see his chest, his shoulders, his upper arms. I wanted to touch him. To feel his skin. To feel his muscle. I admit I wanted to see his penis. Anna had written he'd not been circumcised. I wanted to see how that looked on him, how big it was. I'd never had much body hair. I wondered how much hair he had on his chest, his back, his legs. I wanted to see his toes. I have especially ugly toes.

I was self-conscious in front of him in those first moments, and was to remain so. In an ongoing way he made me feel shapeless and old. He made me feel obsolete, unrealized. I imagined him thinking to himself about me, in whatever language it was he thought in, “So this is all you've made of yourself. This is what, with all your advantages, you've come to.” Ridiculous, really, to feel this way, but hard not to. Less trifling, harder to dismiss, was this: in his presence I couldn't help but feel all the loss I had suffered since I'd been his age. All that had been wasted. All that I'd wasted. The attendant pain. Neither the losses nor the waste were trivial. The pain was well founded and, with Alan to remind me, often disabling. Looking at him there were times I wanted to take him in my arms and weep, and not for him.

At the same time, I knew I was never really like Alan. Not at twenty-one, or at any other time, excepting, perhaps, the moment of birth. He'd had no parents to raise him. Looking at him made me
think—if not at that first instant, then later—about what I might have become, how much less I would have been, without parents, or with different parents than the ones I'd had. My father, the short time he was with me, likewise my mother for a much longer stretch, were diligent and thoughtful with me. When I looked at Alan, I was grateful for them both. In the past year I have become an old man. I am owly. I have an all but defunct heart. But I think, now that I am about to lose it, I have always been grateful, in spite of its inescapable torments, its horrors, its grotesqueries, for the world at large. A world in which Alan had never lived.

I have to say, though I would have come to the moment predisposed neither way, I instantly disliked him. It was not that he so patently disliked me. It was not that he was ignorant and ill tempered and coarse, though he was all that. Nor was it that I felt demeaned, misrepresented by his behavior, or personally responsible for it. You might think it was that I didn't like who I was, myself, at twenty-one. I don't believe that entirely explains my aversion. There may have been a kind of territorial instinct in play. Reflexively, I believe, I saw Alan as a younger, stronger, better-looking double, a creature perversely made in my image, perversely manufactured to be my rival—competitive, acquisitive, usurpatious. If he exists, I may have thought, can I also exist?

I was about his age when I met Sara. I could not imagine him with her.

In that first moment, I felt no guilt or shame. I did not then feel convicted, or even implicated, by Alan's existence. Nor did I take any pride or comfort that afternoon, or later, in having given Alan life. (What, for Christ's sake, had I done? I'd given a test tube's worth of my blood, and then, for twenty-one years, not a single thought.) Looking at him, I never once felt, not then, not ever, the sense of self-perpetuation a man might feel in gazing upon his son. Nothing in my response that first day was paternal; I felt nothing for him that I might have felt for a son. He was a clone, a fact that effaced all other facts, and rendered any knowledge or wisdom I might have acquired along the way pretty much irrelevant. From time to time, in later months—
when I had come to like Alan, to care about him—in moments when he was relaxed around me, I caught myself musing that he was what my son might have been like had he lived. (Had he lived, my son would have been much older than Alan, who had, of course, nothing of Sara in him.) Anna's maternal instinct ran strong. From the first minute she spent with Alan to the last, Anna was tender with him. She was patient and solicitous, compassionate, and as loving as anyone in her situation could have been. Watching her with Alan, watching her teach and tend to him—watching her soothe him when he was wild, distraught—I wondered more than once whether she'd ever, way back when we were in Iowa together, felt maternal towards me. I asked her about this. She laughed. “Not at all,” she said. “Though you could have used a little mothering. And anyway, how could you ask me this? I felt amorous, you clod. How could you not know this? I wanted to sleep with you. I wanted you to take me to bed. How could you not have figured this out?” She told me that her maternal feelings towards Alan were dampened somewhat by her sense, always with her, that she had her own children to care for, to worry about, her own grandchildren. “I mean, finally,” she said, “what is he to me?”

“I used to feel this way sometimes,” she said, “when I was teaching and trying to raise my kids at the same time. Though, thankfully, not all that often, I found myself resenting my students for not being my children, for taking from them my best time and energy. It is hard to have anything left for your own family, when you spend your days teaching other people's kids. Hundreds of them. You know this.” (I didn't know it, but Anna meant no harm.) I take no satisfaction in the supposition that this—it was not quite resentment—this grudgingness, would have been mitigated, at least a little, by the fact that he was
my
clone.

“He is not a child,” the Tall Man had said. He was right and, I am obliged to say, right to warn us. It was easy and convenient to let yourself think of him as a child. Much of his behavior, much of his emotional repertoire, was childlike. But he was a twenty-one-year-old man. He'd been alive and sentient for twenty-one years. He'd had twenty-one years of some sort of experience. He'd been for twenty-one
years in the world of the Clearances, whatever kind of world that might be. If Anna's group was correct in its assumption, he had done some kind of work since he was thirteen.

In the early going, while we were still in Ottawa, Anna was distressed by the tension in my relationship with Alan, the open hostility. She remonstrated with me, appealing to my age and putative wisdom. “Really, he is little more than a child,” she would say, impatiently. “You're old enough to be his father. His grandfather. You ought to know better. It's your responsibility to fix this.”

“Yes, well, he doesn't despise you.”

“You don't have to take it personally,” she said.

“Is it possible he knows?”

“No. It's not possible. He doesn't know.”

 

I looked at Alan sitting on the couch, wearing his Expos cap. He looked at me, saw nothing he liked or needed, and quickly looked away. Then he looked at Anna. He stared at her. It took him a while to figure out who she was. You could see him working for the connection. He'd been in rough shape when he'd seen her last. When he did, finally, recognize her, his response was galvanic. He sat upright and began to bounce on the sofa cushion. His eyes were wide open. His mouth moved, as if to speak. He quivered. He opened and closed his fists, as if he were flashing a signal. Then, though she was on the other side of the room, standing with me by the empty bookcase, he leaned towards her—a kind of phototropic sway—cantilevering off the edge of the couch as if he might stretch himself to the opposite wall. He made a freakish sound. It was not a gasp, though the catch in his breath was audible. It was a whimper, plaintive and piteous, from far back in his throat, high-pitched, cat-like. Once he'd seen her, he did not look at, nor could he see, anything else in the room.

We talked later that night about his response to her, and what it might portend. Anna wanted to explain his reaction as a case of “belated imprinting,” a term she had to invent for the occasion. “Like those little ducklings,” she said, “those hatchlings, who, the first thing they see when they break out of the egg isn't their mother, but a big
orange ball. So they think this ball is their mother, and they attach themselves to it, follow it around, do everything they can to be close to it. I was the first woman he saw when he came out of the Clearances. I might have been the first woman he ever saw. He bonded with me.”

She cited another experiment. Baby monkeys who were given surrogate mothers, inanimate and of varying degrees of softness.

“He got the wire cage,” she said. “I was soft.”

Clearly there was truth in this. He was, at first, fiercely attached to Anna and possessive. He wouldn't let me near her. But it seemed to me her explanation too conveniently passed over the erotic component in his feelings for her.

The question of Anna's physical bearing with Alan was a knotty one and a matter of concern for both of us. In Anna's mind, the process of civilizing Alan, grounding him, gentling him, necessarily involved her touching him, deliberately and with circumspection, but as much as possible.

“He needs to be touched,” she said.

“He seems to
enjoy
it, in any case,” I said.

“He needs it. He's desperate for it.”