The Bradbury Report (38 page)

“Yes.”

“I am a bag of things you use,” he said.

“No longer,” Anna said.

Anna intended her remark to be definitive.

Alan stood up and knocked over his chair.

“I did that,” he said.

“Don't worry about it,” I said.

“You're okay now,” Anna said.

He picked up the chair and threw it against the wall.

“I did that.”

“You did,” I said.

“Don't tell me,” he said.

“You're okay,” Anna said. “You are safe.”

“I am safe,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Nothing will happen to you,” Anna said.

“Nothing will happen to me.”

“No,” I said.

He took the baby book off the table and threw it the length of the apartment.

“That happened,” he said.

“It's okay,” I said.

He looked at me. “What do you want?”

“There is nothing I want,” I said. “Except for you to be safe.”

“Nothing,” he said.

“Nothing but that,” I said.

“I am going to bed,” he said to me. “I don't want you to come in.”

Anna stood up. “Alan.”

“Not you,” he said.

 

The next morning Alan would not speak to us. He would not look at me. After breakfast, he went to his room, and we did not see him again until lunch, which we passed in silence. After lunch—he did not eat much—he was back in his room until dinner. Anna was worried that, left alone, he might do something to injure himself. She went up to check on him every hour or so, but he would not open his door or in any way respond to her. It was only when he came out to use the bathroom we knew he was all right, by which I mean alive. At dinner he was aggressive, barking orders at us, eating as noisily, as crudely as he could, muttering obscenities between mouthfuls.

“You are angry,” Anna said. “You should be angry. But we are your friends. We are here to help you. We are angry, too.”

“Shut up,” he said to her. “You whore. You hag.”

“Stop that,” I said. What kind of father would I have been? How would I have treated my son?

“It's all right,” Anna said.

“It's not all right,” I said.

Alan called me a “fucking ass fuck.” Then he said to me, “I am ashamed of you.”

I thought I saw him beginning to tear. He ran upstairs to his room and shut his door. We didn't see him again until morning.

He had a good heart, and woke the next day repentant. He called for Anna from his bedroom. She went in and sat down beside him on his bed. She held him for a long time. They held each other. When they came downstairs, it was clear they'd both been crying.

“I'm sorry, Ray,” he said.

“I'm sorry, too, Alan,” I said.

At the breakfast table he had questions. Among other things, Anna explained the meaning of the numbers on his arm. (He had seen them all his life and hadn't before wondered.) Anna told him about the Dolly Squad, downplaying the menace. She told him about her group, about her participation in it, about their mission to abolish human
cloning, and, towards that end, about their plans for him. When he had asked his questions, and she had answered them—one question she couldn't answer was, “What will they do with the other clones?”—he stood up from the table. He looked down at us, and said very quietly, “I don't want this.”

 

In a matter of days we were in Calgary, living in a cramped and tatty two-bedroom, ground-floor apartment on 14th Street SW. Save for the motel room in Thunder Bay, where we spent only one night, this was the shabbiest accommodation we were to have in Canada. Alan and I had to share a bedroom again, which, after what we'd told him—installing a sudden, awful, untenable intimacy—was harder for him, and so for me, than it had been in Ottawa, when we were virtual strangers, and he was new to the world, alienated and, especially to me, openly hostile. Who, what, was I to him now? The drive from Regina to Calgary had been a long one, twelve hours, almost five hundred miles, the three of us in the cab of a clattery quarter-ton pickup the Tall Man had foisted on us before we left Regina. Sitting by the window—depending on which one of us was driving, either Anna or I was in the middle, knees to chest—Alan was quiet and somber. We were all somber. The truth, set loose as it was, had made us fragile and, in a way none of us intended, dangerous to one another.

A week into our time in Calgary I had another heart attack, this second one more serious than the first. Alan and I were out on the street in front of the apartment, waiting, neither of us, I remember—I remember little else about this day—feeling much like talking. Anna had gone to get the truck. It was morning, early June, the day warm and sunny. To the west we could see the mountains, which still had snow. Calgary was a sorrowful place for us, but its situation was sublime. Our plan that morning was to drive downtown to a jewelry store on Stephen Avenue. Just the night before, trying to come up with some way, however symbolic, of substantiating his identity, Anna had decided we would buy Alan a signet ring, engraved with his initials, AG. She ran the idea by Alan and me. I thought it was a good idea, though I didn't expect it would make Alan feel much better about
himself or his existential predicament. (That's exactly what it was. Did he exist,
could
he exist, if I also and already existed?) Alan was noncommittal, willing but not enthusiastic. At that point we could have found nothing about which he would have been enthusiastic. Except, perhaps, somehow contriving it that I, or he, had never lived.

Anna pulled up in the truck. I opened the door to climb in. I did nothing more strenuous than that. Then, as Anna told me afterwards, I collapsed, smacking my head on the running board as I went down. All I know about what happened next—up until the time I awoke in Calgary General—Anna told me when she came to visit.

 

The first time she came to the hospital I was heavily sedated and unresponsive. On her second visit, two days after the incident, though I was still in bed, hooked up to a network of wires and tubes, we were able to talk.

“You let out a moan,” she said, “a great shriek, as if your insides were being shredded. Then you collapsed. You gave your head a nasty whack when you fell.”

“I've noticed,” I said. “I'm sorry. That must have been scary to see.”

“It
was
scary. Alan was horrified. When he heard you shriek and saw you fall, he started to scream. ‘Help him! Help him! Help him!' He shouted this over and over again. He was wild. He was spinning around as if he were trying to find the direction from which help might come. At one point he ran out into the street and tried to stop a car.”

“How did I get here?”

“It was an amazing thing,” she said. “Out of the blue, this guy and his wife came running up. A young couple, not much older than Alan. They were two blocks off, they said, but they heard Alan's calls for help. The guy was trained in CPR, and he went to work on you. His wife called the police, while I tried to get Alan under control. By the time the ambulance came, you were breathing.”

“Poor guy,” I said.

“I've got their names written down.”

“I mean Alan.”

“Oh. Yes. I know,” she said.

“Just what we needed.”

“Well, I will say your timing was bad.”

“You'd think he'd be happy to have me out of the way.”

“Oh, no, Ray.” Anna said. “He loves you.”

“I don't think so,” I said.

“Of course he does.”

“He loves
you.”

“I think he does love me,” she said. “And you.”

“Come on,” I said. “I'm occupying his place. I'm the, what do they say,
bane
of his existence.”

“That's true,” she said. “Still, he does love you. I know he does.”

“Where is he, by the way?”

“He's out in the waiting room. There's a pretty candy striper at the desk there. He's looking at her.”

“He's okay by himself?”

“I think so,” she said. “I hope so.”

“Had you better get back?”

“I will in a minute.”

“Are you concerned he'll talk about it?” I said.

“About being a clone?”

“Yes.”

“I'm concerned, sure. I spoke to him about it. I explained it would be dangerous for him to tell anyone.”

“He understood?”

“He seemed to,” she said. “I don't think he'll say anything. I can't imagine he will.”

“Did he want to come in?”

“He was afraid,” she said. “He was afraid to see you.”

“I'd like to see him.”

“Maybe next time. Give him a chance.”

When I first regained consciousness I was visited by the hospital's chief of cardiology, a haughty, elegant Egyptian in his early forties. He
explained what had happened to me. I'd had a heart attack, which he described as massive. I was lucky to be alive. If it were not for the intercession of my Good Samaritan, I would be dead.

They'd found considerable scarring on the heart, he said, and he wanted the history of the prior incident. I told him I'd had the first attack a year ago in August.

“At that time, what did your physician tell you about your condition?”

He talked as if he were reading a questionnaire, as if neither I nor my condition was worth the time and energy it would take him to generate language afresh.

“He told me we'd need to wait for the inflammation to subside before we could assess the damage.”

“What was his assessment?”

There was a chair beside my bed, but he chose to stand for the whole of our conversation.

“I didn't go back for it,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“I left for Canada before it was time. I've been here ever since.”

“In Calgary?”

“In various places,” I said.

“Did you think to consult a physician in any of these various places?”

“No.”

“Are you currently taking any medication for your heart?”

“The doctor in New Hampshire prescribed some drugs. I took them until they ran out. I didn't refill the prescription.”

“I have to say, Mr. Grey, you have behaved irresponsibly. You placed yourself in real danger.”

“I know that.”

“I will need the name of the doctor who saw you after your first attack. I'll want to speak with him. He's in New Hampshire, you said?”

“Yes.”

“Although you live in Nebraska?”

“I do not live in Nebraska. I am not Mr. Grey.”

“When you were admitted,” he said, “they took the information directly from your driver's license.”

“I understand. The information is false.”

This appeared to interest him.

“What's all this about?” he said.

“I don't want to explain,” I said. “I promise you I am harmless and have done nothing wrong.”

The damage to my heart was extensive. “Your heart is shot,” he said. In his opinion, there was no longer any question that I would need a transplant, and as soon as possible. He asked me if it were at least true I was an American citizen. I said I was. Then he asked me if I'd had a clone made. I said I had. He made no effort to hide his disapproval.

“Whoever you are,” he said—I told him my name; he would need it if he were to speak with my doctor in New Hampshire—“whoever you are,” he repeated, “we won't do the procedure here. I must tell you that no hospital in the country will do it.” In Canada, he said, the waiting list for viable hearts was quite long, demand far exceeding supply. (Not so in America, of course. Plenty of hearts.) As (1) an American who'd (2) been cloned, I would be put at the very bottom of the list, and kept there. The best he could do would be to keep me stable until arrangements could be made for the procedure to be performed in the U.S.

“There is a university hospital in Missoula,” he said, “and a first-rate hospital in Spokane. I know surgeons at both places, and both places are relatively close.”

“You assume I want the procedure,” I said.

“Yes, if you want to live, which I assume you do. You had a clone made.”

“Twenty-five years ago,” I said.

“You've had a change of heart.”

It was a stupid joke. Tasteless. He knew it as soon as he said it. He neither laughed nor apologized, as if, by ignoring what he'd said, to disown it. A joke he'd used before, presumably in more hopeful contexts. I didn't mind the joke. What I found offensive was the man's
faultless manicure, and his cuff links, and the fact that he enjoyed standing over me.

“I have,” I said. “How long will I live?”

“Without the procedure?”

“Unless you can perform it here.”

“I can put you on the list,” he said. “That's all I can do. I can tell you, it won't happen.”

“How long?”

“A month or two. Three months, at the outside. Providing you stay in bed, stay quiet, don't exert yourself, take your medication. I can't say for sure. Your heart could stop tomorrow.”

“When can I go home?”

“Do you mean to New Hampshire? I'd have to advise against that. You won't survive the trip.”

“I mean here. Calgary. When can I leave the hospital?”

“Have you got someone to care for you?”