The Bradbury Report (35 page)

“
What
was your job?” he said.

“I was a teacher.”

“You were a teacher?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Did they give you money? The people you teached?”

“The people I taught,” she said.

“Did they give you money?”

“No,” Anna said. “The children I taught did not give me money. The school paid me. Ray was a teacher, too.”

“You were a teacher?” he said to me.

“I was.”

He waited for me to finish my sentence, then prompted: “A teacher.”

“Yes.”

“Did the school pay you, too?”

“They did pay me,” I said. “I'm retired now.”

“What did you say?” he said, though always when he said this he meant, “What do you mean?”

“I don't teach anymore,” I said. “I've stopped.”

“You've stopped?” he said.

“Yes. Anna's retired, too,” I said.

“She's stopped?”

“Yes.”

“You teach
me
,” he said to Anna.

“I do teach you,” she said. “But it's not a job.”

“He gives you money,” Alan said.

“Who does?”

“The Tall Man.”

“He gives me money so we can live. So we can buy food.”

“You don't have a job,” he said, “and the Tall Man gives you money. Ray doesn't have a job.
He
has money. He has a lot of money. I want money.”

Q.E.D., I thought.

 

Before I go further with my report, I want to speak about your expectations for the clone. Your expectations for him, I mean, before he was introduced, when he was, for you, still “the clone”—or, thinking with the government, “the copy”—as, before I met him in Ottawa, he was for me my clone, my copy. I am speaking, very broadly, about your
literary
expectations, those expectations you would have brought to this account derived from types you've encountered in books you've read, movies and television you've watched, not a bit of which, judged by someone fit to judge, might actually qualify as literature.

Alan was not a figment of anyone's imagination, not a figure of fantasy, not allegorical. He was not a noble savage, though he evinced some nobility and some savagery both. The world in which he found himself was not imaginary, but for him it was quite new. It was not unmitigatedly wonderful. Some things were indeed marvels to him, young girls especially, and mirrors, and television, and ice hockey, and sex between women and men, and chocolate chocolate-chip ice cream, and Anna, perhaps most marvelous of all. (What was I to him? It would be hard to say. Not a marvel.) But to most of what he saw outside the Clearances, when he was not afraid or otherwise repelled by it, you'd have to say he was indifferent, surprisingly incurious. He was not a wild child, not a boy who was raised by wolves. The question of who, if anyone, raised him, remains unanswered. Perhaps he would have been better off had he been raised by wolves. He was not a monster, not murderous or malformed. I suppose he
was
analogous to Frankenstein's lugubrious hodgepodge, inasmuch as they were both products of man acting against Nature, usurping God in the creation of life. But Alan was not made from spare parts; he was made to be a source of them. While it has become possible, with cloning, to revivify the dead, Alan was not a revenant, no Rip Van Winkle—notwithstanding in his presence
I
was made to feel like one—though, by his
very essence, he was a creature
of
, though not exactly
from
, the past. Like all clones, he was retrograde; his existence was reactionary: by suppressing diversity, it impeded the evolution of the species. He was not one of those pathetic, lovable, slow-witted lugs who persist in literature and film, who are too good for the world and often inadvertently dangerous to it. Alan was not a danger to anyone else, however much the government feared him. Except in this way: if, as Anna's group hopes it will, the process that began with the discovery of Alan outside the Clearances results in the abolition of human cloning, what will we complicit originals do with the two hundred and fifty million clones already in existence? Would there be any humane, ethical choice other than to let them live among us? What would be the consequences? Mass confusion? Mass hysteria? Mass schizophrenia? The collective disintegration of self? Internecine warfare, twin against twin? The reinstitution of slavery? I don't know that Anna's group has answers to these questions. Would we relocate them? Find them a place where they might live, like us, but apart? Greenland? Madagascar? The precedents, and the prospects, are appalling.

On his last visit to us in Regina, as he was about to leave, I asked the Tall Man about the clone's navel.

Anna and I had talked about this. We knew that as a fetus Alan must somehow have been fed “in utero,” though her group believed his generation of clones was never actually inside a human womb. Anna knew that in the womb the umbilicus (her word) grew outward from the embryo and attached itself to the uterine wall. But if Alan was not of woman born, how, why, would he have a navel? There was a simple answer, which, because of the sadness of it, and because, finally, it explained nothing, we were not ready to settle for. If the umbilical cord formed in the fetus, then it was reasonable to assume it would form whatever the circumambient situation. Whether there was a uterine wall for it to attach itself to would make no difference. The umbilicus would be there, part of the fetus, though, if an alternative way of feeding the fetus had been devised, snaking hopelessly, uselessly about. And useful or not, it would be present at birth. Anna speculated that whatever stopgap incubatory apparatus the government
had developed must have included some input jack through which the fetus could be fed, and to which the umbilicus deludedly attached itself.

“Why does he have a navel?” I said.

“I'll give it to you straight, Ray,” the Tall Man said, speaking my real name. “We don't know. But I'm touched by your interest.”

At the beginning of June, we would be met by the Tall Man when we arrived in Calgary, a beautiful city, set spectacularly, that was not kind to us. He was waiting out in front of the apartment on 14th Street SW, a crummy place where tribulation gathered. The meeting was brief. The Tall Man handed us the keys. He helped us up with our bags. Then he left. As he was leaving, he gave Anna an envelope with cash in it, less than she was hoping for.

 

I imagined it would be good, constructive—in the worst case harmless—to take Alan to a baseball game. I had happy memories—the most vivid in too meager a store—of going with my father, several times a summer, to watch the Fisher Cats play in Manchester. Our hockey night in Winnipeg had been for Alan, for Alan and me, an unalloyed success. He knew nothing about baseball, had never seen it played. The game was not fast or violent; I didn't expect him to be thrilled. But after his two demoralizing outings in the Purg, I wanted him to have, with me, the author of the fiascos on Scarth Street, an encouraging, wholesome, uncomplicated time.

By the third week of May, the weather in Regina, which had persisted wintry through much of April, turned warmer. At a Sonic near our town house, where, to get out of the way, I often went for lunch, I bought two tickets for a Saturday night game, the season opener, between the Regina Red Sox and their rival in the East division of the Western Major Baseball League, the Melville Millionaires.

The day before the game, Anna, Alan, and I drove out to the mall. I told Alan I wanted to buy him a mitt. We were in the Redux. Anna was driving, Alan beside her. I was in the back.

“A mitt is a baseball glove,” I said to him. “I want you to have it for the game.”

“A glove?”

“A kind of glove. Big.” I held up my hand, stretched out my fingers.

“Like for a goalie,” he said.

“Yes. So when you catch the ball it won't hurt.”

“I would like one.”

He held up his right hand—like me, he's a lefty—as I had done. Stretched his fingers. Then he flicked at the bridge of his nose with his index finger and twitched back one corner of his mouth; this meant, at once, to denote and caricature his unease. Whether the result of instinct or observation—surely instinct—so many of the ways he used his body to communicate, his gestures, facial expressions, postures in conversation, were, as Anna never failed to observe—she catalogued our similitudes—exactly mine. “Will I have to play in the game?” he said.

Anna laughed. “No,” she said. “You'll just watch.”

“I won't know how to play baseball.”

“Don't worry,” I said. “We'll sit in the bleachers.”

“What did you say?”

“The stands. We'll sit in the stands. We'll watch the game. You can wear the glove . . .”

“The mitt,” he said.

“The mitt. So if the ball comes to you, you can catch it.”

“The ball will come to me?”

“If you're lucky.”

“Will I be playing in the game?”

“No. You'll be in the stands.”

“The bleachers,” he said.

“If a ball comes to you, it will be foul.”

He looked at me.

“If the ball comes to you,” I tried again, “it will be out of the game.”

“If the ball comes to me,” he said. “it will be out of the game.”

“Yes.”

“Will I catch it?”

“Maybe you will,” I said.

“If I wear the mitt,” he said.

“Yes.”

“If I wear my mitt, and I catch the ball, will I be in the game?”

“No,” I said. “You'll still be watching. With me.”

“But I will catch the ball.”

“Help me,” I said to Anna.

“If a ball comes to you,” she said, “if you catch it, you can keep it.”

“I can keep the ball?”

“Yes,” she said. “It will be a souvenir.”

“What did you say?”

“Something you can keep.”

“I can keep the ball,” he said. He thought for a moment. “Will Ray have a mitt?”

“No,” I said. “I won't have one.”

“If the ball comes to you, how will you catch it?”

“You will catch it for me.”

“Will you be there?” he said to Anna. “In the bleachers?”

“No,” she said. “Just you and Ray. It will be boys' night.”

“Ray's not a boy.”

“Man's night,” she said.

“If I catch the ball,” he said to Anna, “I will give it to you.”

I had not worn a mitt in fifty years. I wanted to get Alan, if they still made them, a Wilson A2000, the glove I wore, as did most of the kids I played with. I was pleased to see they did still make them, though it appeared they came now only in lurid colors—reds and blues, oranges and purples. That they had in stock only two left-handed fielders' mitts, and neither of them an A2000, didn't matter, because Alan decided he wanted a catcher's mitt—jet black with a bright red pocket, and wrong-handed—and would not be talked out of it. I bought him the glove, and a can of tennis balls, as well.

The next day, Saturday, was mild and sunny. In the late morning, at my urging, the three of us went to Victoria Park. I had in mind to give Alan a chance to catch and throw before the game that night. Just to put him in the mood; I had, I assured myself, no ambitions for him. He brought along his catcher's mitt. I brought the tennis balls, and Anna packed lunch.

We played catch on the grass. We stood in a triangle, more or less isosceles, with me at the apex. I threw a tennis ball to Alan, doing my best to hit his glove. After retrieving the ball, he, in a manner of speaking, threw it to Anna; she threw it to me. Anna could really play. She was skillful and puppyish. She whipped her throws, caught equally well with either hand. She bounded around. She was full of laughter. I was stiff, virtually immobile, sulky. I couldn't bear to see Alan wearing that ludicrous glove on the wrong hand, looking as if he was up to his wrist in a big round doughy loaf of black bread. He was, of course, totally inept. Every time he waved his glove at the ball, the glove flew off. He had no idea how to throw: he corkscrewed himself trying to replicate the motion—he wisely took Anna for his model—and never once got the ball near her. We tried reversing the direction of the ball—I threw to Anna, she to Alan, Alan to me—to no effect, except to further fray my patience. Our game lasted only a few minutes. Alan was quickly discouraged, and seeing Anna throw and catch with such ease embarrassed him. It embarrassed me, too. We ate lunch. Anna took a picture of Alan and me, standing shoulder to shoulder, Alan without his mitt (he would refuse to take it to the game). Somehow she got him to smile.

The stadium—it was hardly that—was in a sport park on the Ring Road. I'd estimate it seated a thousand, no more. The stands, ten rows deep, went from foul pole to foul pole. There were no bleacher seats. The outfield fences were wire, maybe six feet high. Beyond them—a difficult background for the hitters—you could see other fields, in use that night by the local little leagues, and a large municipal pool complex. The scoreboard was freestanding, set on stilts behind the left field fence. The field looked rough—the grass scraggly and not quite green, the infield dirt uneven—and hastily readied. The
game started at seven. It was not quite dark when we got there, but the lights were on. I had planned to arrive in time to watch batting practice, but, after the morning's disenchantment, I was not eager, and Alan had pretty much to be bribed with unfounded promises of hot dogs and Cokes and ice cream.