The Bradbury Report (40 page)

“Besides the obvious, ‘Can I write the thing?' ”—I had the computer
in front of me (the bed came with a narrow rolling table that could be placed across it)—“the question is, ‘Will I have the time?' ”

This was the middle of June.

Anna would not speak of this imminence. “Listen,” she said. “You'll want to use pseudonyms. For all of us.”

“What shall I call you?”

“You can call me anything you want?” She smiled. Ruefully. “Not Twink.”

“Not Twink. No.”

“Make me lovely,” she said. “Make me sound lovely.”

“You are lovely, Anna.”

“That's a lie. That is such a lie. You are such a liar.”

“You
are
,” I said. “I think so.”

“I've been thinking about a name for you,” she said.

“What is it? Shitheel?”

“I was thinking ‘Ray Bradbury.' ”

“Why that?”

“He was a writer. We had his books in the house. My mother read him as a girl. He wrote mostly science fiction.”

“Was he good?” I said. “Because I won't be good. This won't be science fiction.”

“I'm sure he was good,” she said. “I never read him, but my mother liked him. I always liked the name. Sounds confident. Authoritative. Honest.”

“I am none of those.”

“Become them,” she said.

“I want my real name, Ray,” Alan said. He was lying on the other bed—it had for a short time been his, but since my return from the hospital, it was Anna's—his clothes on, and his shoes, the pillow laid over his eyes. This was how he was to spend his days, much of them, from then on: lying in that bed—in effect, however dashed he was, keeping me company—while I worked on my report. I wondered what name he had in mind.

“I want to be Alan,” he said.

His real name. Even I could see the sad, bitter irony here.

“You will be Alan,” I said. “I promise.”

 

Unhappily, for all of us, after he'd bought the computer—he has yet to take possession of it, and no longer cares—there was almost nothing Alan really wanted to buy.

“I want to buy a car,” he said, several days after I'd given him the money. He was at his post, splayed out on Anna's bed. I'd begun writing, and was glad for any interruption.

“You don't know how to drive,” I said.

“You can teach me to drive. You are a teacher.”

“I can't get out of bed.”

“When you are better you can get out of bed. Then you can teach me.” He took the pillow off his eyes and sat up. “I have an idea. Anna can teach me. Anna is a teacher. She can drive. She can teach me.”

“Maybe she will,” I said.

Anna heard her name spoken and looked in.

“Maybe I will what?”

“Maybe you will teach me to drive,” Alan said. “You are a teacher. I will buy a car, and you will teach me to drive.”

She looked at me.

“Don't look at me,” I said.

“First I'll teach you to drive,” Anna said. “Then we'll see about a car.”

“First you will teach me to drive?”

“Yes.”

“Then we will see about a car?”

“We'll
see
about it,” she said. “I'm not promising anything.”

“We will see about it,” he said.

The next Sunday morning, in an effort to lift his declining spirits, with the concomitant risk of inflating his hopes, Anna drove the truck over to the middle school not far from our apartment, so Alan could practice in the parking lot. He drove around the lot with Anna beside him. “I had to give him almost no instruction,” Anna told me later that night. Alan was in his room. We were in bed. She in hers, etc. We no
longer worried about him sneaking out: he had given up that ghost. “I found myself hoping if I let him alone,” she said, “he'd drive us into a brick wall, and we'd be finished with it.” I laughed. “I mean it,” she said. “He drove in wide circles, then narrowed them. He spent a few minutes in reverse. I think, actually, he'd be a good driver. He fooled with the knobs and switches. He turned the lights on and off, flicked the brights. We couldn't see the lights in the sun. He tried the radio, which, of course, didn't work. He honked the horn. When he had done all he could think to do in the parking lot, he looked at me and said, ‘Thank you for teaching me.' Then he got out of the truck, and I drove us back to the apartment. There is nowhere he wants to go.”

Anna took him to the mall for what she promoted as a “shopping spree.”

“We look in all the stores,” she told him. “If you see something you like, something you want to buy—if it's a reasonable thing, if you can afford it—you can buy it.”

“Is that a shopping spree?” he said.

“That's what I call it,” Anna said.

“I will spend
my
money?”

“Some of it,” she said. “If you see something you like.”

“Will Ray go on the shopping spree?”

“I can't,” I said. “I have work to do.” Almost unimaginably, this was now the truth.

“He has to write his report,” Anna said.

“I know that,” Alan said. “Will he remember?”

“Will I remember what?” I said.

“My name.”

“You will be Alan,” I said. “I'll remember. When you get back, you can show me what you got.”

They were back in two hours, more quickly than I'd expected. I was dozing when they came in. I found I could work for an hour, an hour and a half, then I had to rest.

Alan came into the room ahead of Anna. “Ray is snoring,” he said. Without another word to me, he slumped onto Anna's bed, unfurled himself, and dropped a pillow over his eyes.

“How was the shopping spree?” I said to Anna. She was in the doorway, holding a large plastic shopping bag loaded with stuff.

She shook her head. “It was good.”

She shook her head again.

“Do you want to show me what you bought?” I said.

Without taking the pillow from his head, he said, “Did you ask
me
that question?”

“Yes.”

“I don't want to show you what I bought.”

“What if Anna shows me? I'd like to see.”

“No,” he said.

“I'll put the bag in your room,” Anna said.

“Thank you,” he said.

When that night, after reading with Alan, Anna came to bed—it was, again, awkward for me to sleep with Anna in the same room, but her presence, as nurse-at-ready now, was reassuring, and the medication I took before bed made it easy for me to sleep—I asked her what had happened.

“He's got a bagful of junk,” she said. “And he knows it's junk.”

“Just junk?”

“He bought himself a camera.”

“That's good,” I said.

“That
is
good,” she said. “We'll need to download the pictures onto the computer.”

“All right.”

“And he bought some sort of contoured pillow for his bed.”

“Okay.”

“A pair of mirrored sunglasses. A backpack. The rest is junk. A pen in the shape of a hockey stick. A pair of alligator slippers.”

“Made of alligator?”

“Chenille. Alligator heads you stick your feet into. He bought a pedometer.”

“What for?”

“I have no idea. For something to buy. He bought a doll.”

I had visions of something inflatable. “What kind of doll?”

“A cheap little plastic thing. Like a Dolly doll.”

“Not here, surely,” I said.

“No. This is ‘Pony Girl.' I assume for the Stampede. Different dress, same exact doll. He had to have it,” she said. “Of everything he bought, the doll was the thing, the only thing, he seemed really keen on. I had to push him to buy the camera. We went into four or five stores where I thought he might find something worth buying. He got discouraged, pretty quickly lost interest, asked if we could stop. We had something to eat, then we came home.”

“Sounds grim.”

“Not grim so much,” she said. “Sapped. Lifeless. You could see him trying to be good company, indulging me. Finally, he asked if there was something I wanted, something he could buy for me. The whole time he was very polite, concerned I not be disappointed in him.”

 

“Listen, Ray,” Anna said the next night. The bedroom was dark, the shades closed, as much to muffle the street noise as to keep out the light. We kept our door open so we could hear Alan. There was a nightlight in the bathroom down the hall, but the bathroom door was closed, and the pallor didn't quite make it to our room. No light shone from beneath Alan's door across the hallway. I had fallen asleep. Anna may have had to say my name more than once. “Ray. I need to talk to you about Alan. Are you awake?”

“I'm awake,” I said.

“Have you got your wits? I need you to know how he's feeling.”

“I've got them. Shoot,” I said.

“I will shoot,” she said. “He was traumatized by what happened to you. Seeing you go down like that in the street. He thought you had died. We both did. Then seeing you in the hospital, lying there so weak and frail. It scared him. And coming, the way it did, on the heels of his finding out who and what he was. He was shattered. Wrecked. How could he have been anything but?”

“That's a rhetorical question, right?”

“Come on,” she said. “Just listen. I can't say exactly what you are to him. His twin, technically, only technically his brother. ‘Original'
uncomplicates your relationship. ‘Friend' is grossly inadequate. He loves you. I know this to be true. As much as he is able to love. In the way he is able to love.”

“What do I say?” I said.

“When you were in the hospital, I did my best to bolster him, to piece him back together. First thing I did, I bought him the signet ring.”

“He's not wearing it.”

“As soon as he put it on, which he did grudgingly, I could see it was wrong. It was an old man's ring, incongruous on him. He wore it the first few days, to please me, then managed to lose it. I combed the apartment, which I see now was cruel. He pretended to help me look. I think he dropped it down a vent. We went for a walk in Prince's Island Park. We had lunch in a different restaurant each day. I could hardly get him to eat. One morning we drove up into the mountains. We went bowling. Nothing helped. I thought about buying him a puppy.”

“Don't. Good lord.”

“I won't,” she said. “He slept a lot. Too much. You see it. When he wasn't asleep, all he wanted to do was talk.”

“About?”

“He wanted to know about you. Not just about your heart, though I had to keep reassuring him you weren't going to die, that you'd be coming back. He wanted to know about your life.”

“What did you find to tell him?”

“He asked how we'd met. He was interested in that story. I wondered how you'd tell it.”

“I don't know how I'd tell it,” I said. “I was a jerk.”

“Not when we met. That story's sweet. He wanted to know what college was like. Where we slept. What we ate. How and what we were taught. Did we ever get drunk?”

“Did we?” I said.

“I was abashed by the truth of it, which is that I never did get drunk. I never have been drunk. Not even alone with my husband.
You have to wonder why not. He wanted to know if we'd made love. I told him we hadn't, and that, at the time, I regretted it.”

“You didn't miss anything,” I said.

“That I regretted it still. Afresh. He wanted to hear about Sara, and about why you had never had children. I told him Sara died in childbirth. I described Sara to him as I remembered her. He asked about New Hampshire. I told him I'd been there only briefly, and that he should ask you about it when he saw you next. Has he asked you about it?”

“He hasn't yet,” I said.

“He was interested to know what you looked like back then. How you combed your hair. How you dressed. I told him you looked like him, which he already knew, and that your wardrobe hadn't changed a bit.

“He asked me about your parents.
His
parents. I had to tell him I didn't know anything about them. Except I remembered how troubled you were when your mother died. More troubled than sad, I thought.”

“Probably true,” I said.

“He asked about me, too, of course. He was especially interested in my life as a child, about what it was like to grow up with a father and mother. It puzzled him to hear my father left us when I was very young. We talked about marriage. He wanted to know how old I was when I got married, and how old you were. Had I wanted to marry you? I told him I'd considered it, but that it had not been up to me. We talked about divorce. He wanted to know how many times you could do it. He asked if I'd ever had cancer. I said I hadn't. It turned out he was under the impression that, sooner or later, everyone had cancer. He wanted to know what menopause was. He'd heard about it on TV. Had I ever had menopause? I sure had, I said. I told him more than he wanted to know about that.”

“Sounds grueling,” I said.

“No. Not at all,” she said. “It's exhilarating to have someone to talk to who is so interested.”

“I'll bet it is,” I said.

“That wasn't a dig.”

“It's true,” I said. “I don't listen well.”

“Well, he stayed interested and engaged no matter what the subject, so long as I was talking about my life, or yours. About life as we'd known it.”