The Bradbury Report (3 page)

Anna was alone, reading. There were stacks of books and papers
on the floor and furniture. From Sara I knew that Anna was hard at work on her master's thesis (she would not stay to finish it) about the Second Korean War. She was in flannel robe, pajamas, and furry slippers. Her hair was gathered in back with a rubber band. She was wearing reading glasses and had on no makeup. It may have been, simply, my blinding need, but I thought she looked better than ever. I was happy to see her. I discovered I had missed her. She was startled and, as you'd expect, not pleased to see me, though she was kind. She invited me in, cleared a space for me on the daybed. Without preamble, without a trace of tact, I asked her if she knew where Sara was. She didn't. She hadn't seen Sara in days. Did she have any idea where I might find her? (It turned out Sara had met up with her old gang, and they'd gone, blithely, to a truck stop by the interstate.) She had no idea where Sara was. I spent most of that night with Anna—I left her room just before dawn—and she displayed no vindictiveness. About her own feelings she was reticent. But she did not once stoop to recrimination. Was there something wrong? Was Sara all right? Her concern was authentic. I said so far as I knew Sara was fine. Then, relieved, giddy to have someone to talk to, someone to listen to me, to comfort me, I fell apart. I began to weep convulsively. Anna sat down beside me on the daybed. She took my hand, and I collapsed into her arms, my head on her breast.

I told Anna about Ann—it was the first she'd heard of her—and our conversation. I kept nothing back. I told her things about Ann and me, things about myself, I would not tell Sara. I confessed to her my fears, rehearsed my failings and frailties, delineated, in fastidious detail, my self-loathing. I was relentless, grotesquely self-absorbed. Anna listened to all of it, the whole woeful inventory. She cosseted me. She tried to be reassuring. I was not so bad as I claimed. I was not evil, just flawed, broken. As she was. As was everyone. (These were the days before Direct Germline Intervention.) Somehow, she was neither patronizing nor disdainful. She was able, even, to evince some joy in the idea that Sara and I were together. When it was over, when I was completely purged and spent, when I had squeezed myself dry and taken everything I could take from her, Anna helped me to the door
and sent me back to Sara, who was, by then, sleeping cozily in our apartment.

Within the week, Anna had left the university. I did not see or speak to her for forty-five years.

 

I am not a religious man. Few people are, these days, religious. I was an infant, too young to remember the tyrannous, hateful, pseudo-Christian mania that took hold of the country in the reign of George Bush (“the Pretender,” now, to distinguish him from his less malignant father). I was too young to remember the violent and mass recoil that accompanied his downfall, away from a zealously theocratic state, in which regressive stupidity was institutionalized, to an equally zealous secular one, in which science was allowed to proceed unchecked. Ours was a tepidly Presbyterian house. My parents were not at all serious about matters of faith, and we barely registered these radical shifts in policy and mood.

This past year, led by the events I tell of here, I have begun reading through the Bible, in a methodical but unscholarly way, Old Testament to New, without a clear understanding of why I am doing it. I have the Authorized Version, the King James. It was not easy to obtain a copy. I bought it when we first got to Montreal, in a secondhand bookstore on the Rue de la Montagne. I have taken it with me through every move. It is with me now. It is a beautiful book, in fairly good condition. Oversized and heavy. I am a slow reader. I am finding some of it familiar, some of it utterly strange, some of it dull and useless, some of it beautiful and moving. I have not, as yet, turned to God. It is the story one comes to first, the story of Adam and Eve, which for me has been most provocative. Eve was made from Adam's rib. It follows: Adam, the first man, was also the first original. Because she was made from him, Adam would have felt a special warmth for this last, derivative animal. Through this asexual mode of reproduction—unprecedented and, until recently, unrepeated—God, as I read the story, opened up a gap in the otherwise sturdy, previously impeccable rib cage. That is, He made in Adam a highway to his, Adam's, heart. Forgive the bumptious metaphor, but I have been opened up
just so. I have been re-made. I had forgotten who I once was, who I once might have become. I have been made to remember. (Eve was born knowing deep down the way to Adam's heart, and, fatefully, with the means to turn his heart from God.) In our systematically de-scriptured world, the copy is made from the genetic material of the original. The original thus serves as a new Adam, a peculiarly modern Adam, a voluntary Adam, an Adam with an enlightened self-interest, an Adam who is asked to risk not very much (a blood cell or two) in this peculiarly modern version of the biblical investment—for health rather than love, human or divine. The copy is made to serve the original, as—here it gets turned around—Adam served Eve. If it should ever be required.

 

Before Anna contacted me and initiated this series of events, in the twenty-one years since it had been made not only legal, and socially and ethically legitimate, but also routine—it is the exceptional case that an original does not have his umbilical cord blood collected and banked—I had not given much thought to the matter of clones and cloning. I'd given no thought at all to my clone, wherever he was. (I knew where he was, if I'd permitted myself to think about it.) In this way I was like the rest of the American populace. After a year of conversation with Anna—she did most of the talking and provided all of the knowledge—I am convinced that the government has done everything in its power to keep us from thinking about the subject. The very terms we use—“original,” “copy”—were designed to be flattering to the former, dismissive to the latter, to be less scientific, less clinical, more palatable, ultimately blinding. When it is considered at all by the American public, cloning is taken, gratefully, for the centerpiece of a federal health care system. This fiction persuades and placates us (and, not incidentally, allows the government to do little else for us in the way of health care). I use Anna's language of protest. It does not come naturally to me. My involvement in this is personal, not political, but you must see, as I now do, that we are all complicit. We are guilty, individually and collectively, of a staggering narcissism. From the inception of this inhuman practice, which diminishes and
defines us—we are consummate sheep; the only real public debate was about whether or not to privatize the business of cloning—there have been pockets of resistance. These groups are tolerated, co-opted, impotent. (Anna and her husband were active in the opposition. Both refused to participate in the replication program. This refusal was to cost Anna's husband perhaps twenty or thirty years of life.) There is a terrible symmetry to be noted. The United States is the only country in the civilized world where cloning is legal and state-sponsored. It is everywhere else outlawed. We are again the rogue among enlightened nations, as, for so long, we were in our refusal to abjure capital punishment. Having finally abolished that barbarous usage, the United States now reserves its sanctioned executions—few know about this; no one talks about it—only for superfluous or, in the rarest of cases, wayward clones. And their abettors.

 

Anna's call came a year ago last July, ominously, as I've said, on the 25th. That spring I'd taught my final semester at the high school in Lebanon. I'd been more than ready to quit, but I had not yet found the rhythm for retirement. At a low level, I was restless, bored, disoriented, but willing to loaf and idle. Without knowing it, I had begun to feel the debilitating effects of a diseased heart. I had vague plans to travel. I wanted to go back to Scotland, to the Trossachs, Loch Voil, where Sara and I had been on our honeymoon. I wanted to live for a while, maybe two or three months, in Italy, in Umbria, in, say, Spoleto, which I knew little about, except that the very expensive olive oil Sara used in cooking was made there. I'd always imagined a leisurely, picturesque drive across the northern part of the country, from New Hampshire to Washington State, taking the Minnesota ByPass up through Canada. I thought about riding out a New England winter or two in Hawaii, or Arizona, or American Samoa. I had read too few of the major works of English literature, and I told myself this would be my chance to do that, knowing, though I actually bought a one-volume complete Shakespeare, I never would. I had people I could meet for the occasional lunch or coffee, but I had no real friends. After all my widower years of eating in restaurants, I thought about
learning to cook for myself. I do not fish. I have no hobbies. Had Anna not called, I might well have simply come to a gradual stop.

It was a Saturday, 11 o'clock in the morning, 10 o'clock her time. I was still in my pajamas. The day was cool, the air finally clean, and I had the windows open. I had not slept well. I was finding it harder to get, and to stay, asleep. For no reason I could think of, my right shoulder ached. It was tender to the touch. I was sitting at the kitchen table, eating dry cereal and working the crossword puzzle in the local paper. Outside the kitchen window, two red squirrels gibbered at one another, while Sophie and Marie, the twins from next door, drew chalk figures on their driveway. The Internet chimed, an uncommon occurrence in my house.

“Is this Ray Bradbury?” the female caller asked.

To protect Anna, and myself, and anyone else to whom contact with us might lead, I have changed the names of persons and places whenever it seemed advisable. Anna's maiden name was not Weeks, nor was her married name Pearson. My name is not Ray Bradbury. When I began to write this report, Anna suggested I take this name. She is a great reader and tells me Ray Bradbury was a writer well known in the latter half of the last century. I live in New Hampshire, but not in Lebanon. Sara Bird was not Sara
Bird
. She did not come from Indianola, but someplace like it. Even Le Mars, in northwest Iowa, where I said Anna and I stopped on our outing for beefsteaks and sweet potato fries, was not Le Mars.

“It is,” I said.

“This is Anna Pearson. You may not remember me.”

I thought for a moment. I couldn't place the name. This happened to me quite often. “I don't.”

“No,” she said. “When you knew me I was Anna Weeks.”

“Anna?”

“Yes.”

“I remember. Of course I remember. Is it you?”

“Yes.”

“How are you? Where are you?

“I'm in Iowa. I never left. I'm all right. What about you?”

“I'm okay,” I said. “I'm older than I was. Old. You wouldn't know me.”

“We are both old. I would know you.”

“Not likely,” I said. “This is a sweet surprise. Are you still speaking to me?”

“I am. Obviously.” She laughed. “I was angry with you. For a long time. You hurt me, you know.”

“I do know,” I said. “I was a lout.”

“Yes. You were.”

“I don't like to think about it.”

“Do you think about it?”

“Probably I don't,” I said. “Probably not.”

“Just as well,” she said.

“It's not.”

“You were in love. You were a boy.”

“I was.”

“And Sara? How is
she?
Are you two still together?”

“Sara died.”

“Oh, no,” she said.

“It was a long time ago. Thirty-five years.”

“What? What happened?”

“She died in childbirth.”

“And the baby?”

“He died, too.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “I'm so sorry. How terrible.”

“Thank you. It
was
terrible.”

“I don't know what to say. I've thought about Sara often.”

“I have, too,” I said. “Are you married?”

“I was. My husband died this past year.”

“
I'm
sorry.” I said. “There is no escape.”

“From?”

“Sadness. Pain. It heaps up.”

“No,” she said. “I
am
sad. I do miss him. I miss him every minute. But we had a good, long life. We had children together. I am grateful for it. Absolutely. Glad.” She was quiet. Then: “That was
thoughtless. Forgive me. I don't mean to be cruel. This must be hard for you to hear.”

“Not at all,” I said.

At my request, she spoke briefly about her husband, who'd been a nurseryman, and about her children. There were three of them, two boys and a girl: the oldest a professor of history; the middle child, the girl, a labor and delivery nurse; the youngest, a graduate student in philosophy. One of her sons lived in the Pacific Northwest, the other abroad. Her daughter was close by. There were, so far, two grandchildren.

“You did well,” I said.

“I've been very lucky. Lately I've wished the boys were nearer to home.”

“They'll come back,” I said, not quite knowing what I meant.

“Oh, they do. They're good boys.”

“Are you still teaching?”

“I retired last year,” she said.

“I just retired,” I said. “This spring.”

“What will you do?”

This question, it turns out, was somewhat disingenuous.

“I have no idea,” I said. “What do you do?”

“I keep busy.”

Then she said my name. Not Ray, of course, but my actual Christian name. She spoke it in a way—knowing, affectionate, beseeching—I'd not heard since Sara died. It startled me to hear my name said this way again.