The Bradbury Report (31 page)

“Listen,” Anna said to him. “This is important. You must not speak this way to Ray. Especially when Alan is around. Do you understand?”

I was grateful for her intercession.

The Tall Man smiled at her. “I do understand,” he said. “You can have three days. That's all I can give you.”

“The sad part is Alan likes it here,” Anna said. “He's just beginning to feel at home.”

“I'm sorry,” the Tall Man said.

“Will we be going far?” she said.

“Depends on what you mean by far.”

“Oh, for Christ's sake!” I said. “Where are we going? Just tell us and cut all the crapola.” I surprised myself: this was my father speaking.

“When you need to know,” he said.

Though you'd have to say our moves were scarcely unpredictable—west on to the next city of any size—we would twice more have to suffer this “for me to know” charade: at the end of three months in Winnipeg, and again, after three months in Regina.

“How's the money holding out?” he asked Anna on a later visit. “Are you doing okay?

“I could use some more,” Anna said without any hesitation. “Is there more?”

The Tall Man looked at me, by his look meaning me to know that he knew I still had plenty of money. I had more than he imagined. “I think we might be able to scratch some up,” he said to Anna. “You'll have it before you leave.”

This was at the end of May, right before we departed Regina for Calgary, and right before my second heart attack. I remember this exchange about money, because I counted it as one of my few victories, but more so because it was that evening, just after dinner, that we decided to tell Alan about himself.

 

Alan watched a lot of TV. Far more than I thought good for him, but Anna's claim for its demonstrable benefit prevailed. At first he was amazed by it and would watch spellbound pretty much whatever came on, but by the time we got to Winnipeg he'd become discriminating, had mastered the remote control, and memorized the time and channel
for the shows he liked. As I've said, if we'd allowed him to, he would have watched television sixteen hours a day, sitting cross-legged on the floor up as close to the set as he could get, the thing at top volume. For the sake of our sanity, we were forced to impose certain rules, which were hardly ungenerous, but by which he only grudgingly agreed to abide. He could watch one hour in the morning before breakfast, one hour in the late afternoon, after his “lessons” and whatever other activity we might have planned for him, and two more hours—if a Jets game was on, we'd let him watch it to the end—when we'd all finished dinner and he'd done his share cleaning up. There was no television during meals, no cartoons or anything else infantilizing, no horror films—this last injunction grievously belated, considering what he'd lived—nothing, if we could help it, that celebrated violence, or sanctioned it. (We made an unprincipled exception for hockey.) One of us would be in the room with him when the television was on. We did not think to prohibit pornography, which, after midnight was all too available. We were most afraid, I suppose, that before we'd raised the subject, he would see or hear something that had to do with cloning—a news report (every once in a while, you'd see in one of the Canadian papers an anti-American op ed piece that included cloning in its catalog of our evils), a feature film, a throw-away remark in one of the silly comedies he watched—but we need not have worried. Even in Canada there was little public awareness of the subject.

Alan was a great fan of the Winnipeg Jets. He was a zealot, really. He was euphoric when they won, despairing when they lost, and that season, inconveniently, they weren't very good. My father had a similar relationship to the Boston Red Sox, similar responses in both kind and occupying power. But my father had grown up playing baseball and watching the Red Sox. Before Alan watched his first game—he happened upon it flashing through the channels after dinner—he knew nothing about hockey. (I suspect, in his quick-set and utter commitment, his self-abnegating fealty to a thing that was void of any real meaning, there was some anthropological truth to be found.) To take it back a step, such concepts as sport, game, athlete, competition—
the concept of play, even—meant nothing to him. There was no doubt the fighting was an appeal. But he might have been watching a form of dance, or politics, or courtship, or war, all of which, likewise, he knew nothing about. In the town where I grew up, there was a park at the end of our street, with a rink and warping, waist-high boards that appeared overnight and a warming house, where I learned to skate pushing a kitchen chair around the ice and, though I could never skate backwards without falling and didn't take to checking, played a bit of pickup hockey. I knew the rules, but none of the subtleties. Played at the professional level the game had no appeal for me. But Alan loved it—he was a fan only, never showed any interest in skating, himself—and by the time he'd watched, say, his sixth game, knew most of the Jets players' names and numbers, and understood enough about what was going on to deliver, win or lose, an earnest, if faulty, blow-by-blow. Most of the time, in the interests of fellow-feeling, I'd watch with him.

In the middle of February, before we left Winnipeg, we took him to a Jets game. The night was clear and dry, the snow on the ground like laundry soap. It was dangerously cold, the temperature, not figuring the wind, further below zero than I'd ever experienced. Breathe in through your nose and your nostrils froze shut. Any area of exposed flesh was, in minutes, frostbitten. Anna tried to beg off. She had no interest in hockey. “It will be a good chance for you and Alan,” she said, “to have an outing on your own.” I insisted she come. Things, by then, were cordial between Alan and me, but I didn't think we were quite ready for that. I was worried being at the game might over-excite him and cause him to come unstrung. As it happened, Alan was in a frenzy from the dropping of the first puck to the final horn, but, despite the discouraging score, it was, if such a thing can be, a joyous frenzy. The worse things got for the Jets, the more the fans around us, drunker by the minute, screamed and moaned, the more Alan joined in with them, the more, in their collective distress, he enjoyed himself. I'm afraid it may have been the happiest three hours of his life.

We bundled up—Alan refused to wear anything on his head but his Jets cap—and took a cab to the arena. The Jets were playing the
Ottawa Senators, their archrival according to Alan, and the much superior team. The game was my idea, and I paid for the tickets. Our seats, which we'd bought at the last minute, were bad: we were in the uppermost tier, in a section towards the back, but Alan didn't complain. To his great delight, the Jets stayed close for half the first period, and even scored a goal on a power play. (It was to be their only goal.) In the two minutes before the break, the Jets goalie, as if he'd been bewitched or bought off, fell apart, letting in three straight goals. “He's a sieve,” Alan said to me, and with the rest of the fans raucously demanded he be benched, and then executed. Alan had his first Coke. In the lobby on the way in I bought him a souvenir program and a felt pennant for the wall above his bed. After the game—despite the dismal result, he was still elated—I bought him a jersey, lettered on the back with the name of his favorite player, an American winger named Finnegan, who'd spent most of the night in the box.

By the end of the second period the score was 7 to 1 in favor of the Senators, who were, by then, skating their fourth line every other shift, and had replaced their star goalie with his backup. In the break before the final period more than half the fans went home, most of them season ticket holders from the choicer seats. At the start of the third period, I pinpointed a whole row of vacated seats in the Jets end, where most of the action was, on the curve, up against the glass. I told Anna where I was going, and to watch for my signal. I found the usher at the head of the section. I pointed up to where we were sitting. I told the usher, an old man asleep on his feet, it was my son's first hockey game. As matter-of-factly as I could, I offered him twenty dollars. He snatched the money. He told me if we wanted to come down, he couldn't condone it, but he'd look away. I waited for Anna and Alan to join me. When the usher saw Alan, he looked surprised. He may have thought he'd been deceived, but he said nothing.

When Alan found himself so close to the ice, he was delirious. I have to say, it was very exciting. Even Anna was thrilled. We could smell the ice, feel the chill. We could see the players' faces, their sweat, hear them grunt and swear. Up that close you got an accurate sense of their speed and power. The force, the rage with which they slammed each
other against the boards, against the glass, which seemed that it would shatter, was, the first few times, quite shocking. Alan banged the flat of his palms on the glass. He shouted insults at the Senators' players, harangued the refs, but saved his loudest, most indignant catcalls for the hapless Jets.

When we were in the cab on the way home, in the backseat huddling together for warmth—Anna in the middle, Alan and I pressed against her on either side—Alan, who had not stopped chattering since the game ended, went abruptly quiet. Then he looked over at me and said, “Thank you.”

He may have said that to me before—Anna insisted on polite-ness from him—though he would rarely talk to me, and almost never when Anna was around to talk to instead, but it was the sincerity with which he said it that floored me.

“You're welcome,” I said.

“Thank you, Ray,” he said—he wanted to get it just right—“for taking me to the game.”

“It was my pleasure,” I said.

“I had fun,” he said.

“I'm glad,” I said. “I'm glad you had fun.” I
was
glad.

“Did
you
?” he said. Coming from him, this was more than perfunctory. “Did
you
have fun?”

“I did,” I said. “I sure did. Thanks for asking.”

“You're welcome,” he said.

I could see Anna was gratified.

“Sorry they lost,” I said.

He smiled at me. “They were bad.”

“Yeah, they were.”

“Weren't they bad?”

“They stunk,” I said.

He laughed. “They stunk,” he said. “They did.” Then he conjugated the verb. “They did stink,” he said. “They stink.”

That was the end of our epoch-marking conversation. Alan did not say another word the rest of the way home. Back in the apartment it was business as usual, Alan focused exclusively on Anna.

 

It was when we were in Winnipeg, on Goulet Street, that Alan discovered pornography. By the time I caught him at it, he might already have been watching several nights, or several weeks, I can't be sure. After midnight there were three or four channels on which one could watch hard-core pornography, films and live action, continuously until just before dawn, with short respites for ads, most of them for sexual devices or online sex clubs and the like, the ads themselves unabatedly obscene. By law these channels are located only in the upper reaches of the 400s. The rationale given is this: as there are rarely active channels above 300, there is a smaller likelihood of anyone—an unsupervised child, say, up late—coming upon the stuff accidentally. These laws, no matter how they are framed, are notoriously ineffectual. The only thing they seem to prevent, so far anyway, is the showing of pornography that involves children. Alan might have been the one sentient being in Winnipeg not to know exactly where these channels were and what they offered.

I don't know how Alan happened on the channels—intuition driven by desire? a perverse providence? monkeys and typewriters? —but for however long it had been going on, he got out of bed around midnight, after I was dead asleep and snoring, and went quietly into the living room, where he watched with the sound nearly off, out of consideration for us or merely protecting his privacy. He sat on the couch, the room dark except for the tawdry light from the TV, the cinch of his pajama bottoms loosened. He was masturbating when I came in, and apparently ejaculating into paper towels, a wad of which he held in his free hand. He had the whole roll beside him on the couch.

When I saw him like that, I was embarrassed. I was also glad, for Anna's sake, I'd been the one to find him.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I didn't know you were in here.” What could I have said? “Cut it out?” “Carry on?” Stupidly, I stood there, as if waiting for his response. Alan was not the least bit embarrassed. He immediately stopped what he was doing and turned off the TV with the remote. In the forgiving dark he retied his pajama bottoms, gathered up the used paper towels, and left the room without speaking
or looking at me. I went to the bathroom. When I got back to the bedroom, he was in bed and asleep, or pretending to be. As I'd hoped.

I didn't say anything to Anna about what I had seen. The next night, when I woke at two a.m. needing to use the bathroom—Alan didn't know what a prostate gland was and couldn't have figured mine would be enlarged and hard as a nut—he was not in his bed. Again I found him in the living room, sitting on the couch, the TV on, the paper towels, etc. I'd had a day to give some thought to what I might do, and I'd come up with the idea that I'd offer to sit and watch along with him (so long as he didn't continue to abuse himself), even talk to him about what he was seeing (“And here we have . . .” ), thinking, thereby, to strip the situation of any illicitness that might be part of its allure. But it was not its illicit nature that drew Alan. He felt neither ashamed nor accused by my intrusions. Alan simply wanted to watch people, men and women—I'm sure there was nearby a channel wholly devoted to male-male sex, but this would have put him off—young men and (O brave new world!) young
women
, engaged in sexually explicit acts, the more explicit, the more closely, clinically, microscopically exhibited, the better. For him this was educational TV, and, I now think, necessary. When he became aware of my presence, he turned off the TV, gathered his supplies, and, without a word, went straight to bed. I watched him to see if he was angry at my infringement, but he was neither angry, nor embarrassed. His attitude was one of acceptance and accommodation.