The Bradbury Report (29 page)

“What did you think would happen?”

“I had no idea,” I said.

“Nothing would have happened,” she said.

“You don't know that.”

“I do,” she said.

“Did you hear what he said?”

“Yes.”

“What do you think?”

“Just words,” she said.

“Oh, I don't think so.”

I slept on the couch that night, and for a week to follow. Anna slept in her room. I insisted she lock her door, which she agreed to do. Once I'd vacated the room, Alan was content to sleep by himself.

 

Somewhere near the start of this report I remarked on an improbable moment in time—I was twenty-two, in graduate school—in which
three women, Ann and Anna and Sara, were interested in me, two of them, Ann and Sara, professedly in love with me. Given my, I believe realistic, estimation of myself, and my scant experience with girls, it was a flabbergasting moment, really. I didn't know then what to make of the convergence and, after a year of looking at Alan, trying to understand his/my/the appeal, I don't know what to make of it now. Take Ann from the mix (which I did unceremoniously): we'd been friends since childhood; the love we felt for one another was as much filial as anything else and not—this must, anyway, have been true for her—contingent on physical appearance. But how to explain Anna's response, and, more unfathomable, Sara's? Neither, as I see it, had any compelling, even legitimate, reason to love me.

Anna assures me Alan is good-looking, often adding—not only in the interests of accuracy—that he is better looking than I was when she knew me when. I will agree he is not bad-looking, and that he looks better than I ever did, but when I look at him, especially with the intent to compare—I try to do this as little as possible—I see mostly the things I don't like in myself.

Like me, he has almost no body hair. (As a teenager, this was the cause of recurrent embarrassment, and, via a series of variations on the theme, earned me the nickname “Bean,” which stuck.) After several months with us, Alan began to be less vigilant, and I did, a few times, see him in his boxer shorts. Like me, he has no hair on his chest or stomach, except for a thin vertical line of hair on his breast bone, which I've always thought looks like the scar from an incision, and ugly wires of hair, like hairs on a mole, springing from his nipples and unexplained navel. As is true of me, the only hair on his legs is in small ridiculous tufts above both knees. Though when I first saw him in Ottawa, he had some color on his face and arms—an indication that before he came free of the Clearances he'd spent considerable time out of doors—by the time we reached Winnipeg, and winter, his skin—everywhere but his face—was, like mine in all seasons, bleached and waxy. His fingers, like mine, are short and thick and small-nailed, his thumbs, like mine, stunted. While not grotesque like the Tall Man's,
Alan's hands and mine are less than comely. Two fingers on my right hand, my throwing hand, are crooked, as a result of baseball injuries incurred while catching; all of Alan's fingers are straight. My feet, arches fallen, soles splayed—I take this as a great indignity—are a size 12 now and bigger than his, though when I was his age I, too, wore size 10. Except for the big toe, my toes—the result of ill-fitted shoes?—curl under, my little toes barely visible, the nails like horn. Alan's toes are trim.

Our eyes are hazel, our noses long and thin. His hair is darker and fuller than mine, wavier, but I remember having hair like his. His teeth are whiter than mine, which have gone gray like the rest of me. I have a slight overbite; he does not. He looks down when he smiles—which he does grudgingly and not often—as I do. I've often wondered, about myself, why that is. A gesture of shyness? Submissiveness? Fear? It is a move, in any case, deeply ingrained and beyond my control, and watching Alan reminds me I have spent too much of my life looking down and away.

One rarely gets to hear his own voice as others hear it, but Anna confirms Alan's voice has the same timbre, I suppose you'd call it, the same—not unpleasant, I find—throaty quality. His laugh, less frequent than his smile, is short-lived and through his nose, as, equally infrequent, my laugh is. When he is perplexed, which is much of the time, he scratches the side of his head with his index finger, like a chimp imitating a human in thought. That, as Anna has noted, I do the very same thing makes me cringe. He mimics me ceaselessly, though without meaning to. It was hard, the first few months of our cohabitation, not to feel ceaselessly mocked.

In this way Alan is lucky: he does not see himself in me.

I am circumcised. Alan, as I know from reading Anna's journal, is not. I do not use my hands when I speak. I'd have thought this would be learned behavior, a matter of decorum. Maybe it is, but Alan does not use his hands when he speaks. Genetically determined or not, when I watch him, his hands still, stiff at his sides, it seems unnatural.

When he listens, when he is interested in what is being said, and especially if it is Anna saying it, he tilts his head to one side, like a puppy. I pray to God I don't do that. I have only once seen him cry. I don't cry either.

 

We stayed in Ottawa, in the apartment on Friel Street, three months, until the end of November. We were also to live for extended periods in Winnipeg, Regina, and Calgary. Of all these—if, I mean, I could have been there by myself—I liked Ottawa best, a stately, calm, workable city.

We spent most of our days in Ottawa in the same way. In the morning, after breakfast—while I ran errands and did other tasks, many of them unnecessary, that took me away from the apartment—Anna would work with the clone for several hours on language skills, speaking and reading. She quickly forsook the books she'd bought in Montreal. They were beyond him. She did spend some time each night reading to him from
The Prince and the Pauper
and, when they'd finished that, from
Oliver Twist
, neither one of which he seemed to mind. (He'd pay no attention to books in which the main characters were animals or toys, nor to fairy tales or blatant fantasies.) At the first chance, we picked up a shelf's worth of easy-reading books, wordbooks with pictures, etc., which seemed to suit him. Anna saw quickly, though, that what was most productive, most educative, was for her to talk to him, systematically and at length, which she did as often as he was willing to listen. He was not desperate to learn the language.

She named the world, starting with the apartment and, with the help of a children's atlas, moving outward. When, in her judgment, Alan's behavior had become more civilized, less erratic—it took just a couple of weeks under her tuition—and when he showed himself less openly hostile towards me, allowing me, for example, to sleep in the bedroom, we were willing to take him out in public. After lunch, if the weather was good, he and Anna would walk the streets, first sticking near the apartment, then venturing farther afield. I'd go with them occasionally,
though Alan was less predictable, harder to control, when I was along. He enjoyed the changing of the guards. He liked to walk along the canal, and to stand in the concourse outside the Chateau Laurier. He liked to watch people milling about. He liked to watch couples, groups of young men and women, going around together, though he would become anxious in the vicinity of a group of men, young or older. Anna talked to him about what he was seeing. We bought the closest thing we could find to a child's guide to human anatomy and physiology, and after she'd named for him her body parts and his—I was careful to absent myself for this lesson—they turned to the text. She talked to him about history, about, for instance, the Second Korean War, which had been her specialty. He liked it when she spoke about war. From time to time—this did not much please Alan—she enlisted me to talk to him about arithmetic, the idea of numbers, matters of simple addition and subtraction. Neither of us spoke to him of death.

He enjoyed it most—she enjoyed it, too—when Anna talked about herself, her life. (She tried to tell him about me, what she knew, but he was less interested in that. Though he took a meanspirited pleasure in the story, which ended with me flat on my ass, of my chasing Anna and Sara up the snowy hill in Ames.) There were stories he asked to hear again and again. He was delighted when she'd elaborate or embellish the story, but he would brook no hint of abbreviation. He particularly liked one story, which he asked for obsessively, about a crabapple tree. The story in its simplest form was this:

“When I was a little girl, six or seven years old, I was sitting in the house one morning. It was summertime. I had nothing to do. I asked my mother if I might play outside in the backyard. I had it in my mind to climb the ancient crabapple tree that was back there. This was something I was always wanting to do. My mother said I could go out, so long as I didn't try to climb the tree. ‘The branches are thin,' is what she always said to me, ‘they are brittle, and if you climb on them, they will break.' I assured her I would not climb the
tree. I went outside. There was not much to do in my backyard if you were alone. I decided to climb the tree. I had been up in the tree before, despite my mother's prohibition, but I'd never gone very high in it.

“I climbed up to the first tier of branches and wedged myself in. The branches were thick and sturdy. I sat there for a while looking at the yard, at the house, watching the kitchen window for any sign of my mother.

“I climbed higher in the tree. I found a perch where I could sit. The branches were thinner here, but easily bore my weight.

“I climbed higher. Now I was as high up as the second floor of my house. Still the branches didn't break.

“I climbed higher. I climbed to the very top of the tree. As I got to the top, I heard the branch I was resting on crack and give way. I fell. Somehow I didn't hit any of the branches on the way down. I landed on the lawn with a splat.” [This was the word in the story Alan liked best.] “I missed a brick barbecue by inches. I was not hurt at all. I stood up and brushed myself off. My mother had come to the kitchen window just as I fell and saw it happen. She was very frightened, then, when she saw I was unhurt, very angry. She scolded me, then sent me to my room for the rest of the day. I did not get any supper that night.”

I'm afraid I've done the story justice. As a storyteller, Anna was no great shakes. (I am hopeless when I try to tell a story out loud, and never do it.) And unless one chose to marvel at the fact that she emerged unharmed—which, I believe, was not what interested Alan—and not, as I did, to doubt, because of that fact, its veracity, the story was, to my mind, relatively innocuous. There's no knowing why Alan prized it.

Sad to say, but, in spite of Anna's industry and skill, it was clear Alan got most of his language, most of his sense of the world, from television, which he watched as much as we'd let him, and more. Anna and I disagreed about this, Anna arguing for television—with limits—on the grounds of language acquisition, socialization, acculturation,
while I argued against it, on the grounds of inanity. For Anna, the time Alan spent watching TV served another purpose. Alan hardly moved when the TV was on, and it was the only time when she felt it was safe to leave me alone with him, the only time she could take for herself.

A
lan was captivated by mirrors and pleased by his own reflection. Even assuming there are no mirrors to be found inside the Clearances—hard to think why the government would want the clones to see themselves, to whatever extent mutilated or pristine—Alan's fascination with them seemed not a function of their novelty, rather a genuine and durable delight. We would find him gazing at himself in the mirror over the sink—standing transfixed more often and for longer periods than one could imagine—in the full-length mirror on the bedroom door, in the hall mirror, in Anna's hand mirror. In all the apartments we lived in (before this one), he would, when we gave him nothing else to do, shift from one mirror to the next, savoring the severally framed and sized views of himself. He looked at himself in shop windows, in car windows, in puddles, in cutlery. We found this activity, at which he was tireless, disconcerting, and did what we could to discourage it. I asked him, once, about this preoccupation. I don't remember how I put the question—rude, no matter how I put it—and all he would say in response was, “You look at yourself.” Although it is strictly true that I do look at myself—shaving, brushing my teeth, etc.—it is with almost no interest and never with satisfaction. (I shave pretty much every day now; my beard comes in gray and coarse. But like Alan, when I was his age I hardly needed to shave. Alan shaves
once a week, and he is skillful at it.) However it might sound, I think in Alan's case it wasn't a function of vanity. It wasn't, I mean, that he particularly liked the way he looks, though he may have. He seemed to me mostly indifferent to his appearance and to the appurtenances of his dress. Standing before a mirror he did not fix his hair or strike experimental poses or, say, check his teeth. He seemed not to care how he might look to others. I think he simply liked to look at himself, liked to see himself, because, fundamentally, he liked himself. Not what you'd have expected. You'd assume he had not been taught or encouraged to like himself. Still, until we told him who and what he was—Anna told him, I stood by, an avatar, at once, of his innocence and the curse into which he was born—he continued to find himself lovable.

I have been thinking about this question of self-love, wondering about my responses to Alan. Could any of these responses be simply, purely, responses to Alan alone? Isn't every one of my responses bi-directional, going both outward and inward simultaneously? When I am responding to Alan, aren't I, at the same time, responding to myself?