The Bradbury Report (43 page)

“No,” I said.

“I mean before.”

“Before I was married?” I said. “No. Never.”

“Will you make love to her?”

“I won't make love to anyone.”

“Will I ever make love to a girl, Ray?”

“Maybe you will.”

“Maybe I will,” he said.“Is it good?”

“Making love?”

“Yes.”

“Sometimes it is,” I said.

“Sometimes it is.”

“Yes.”

“Sometimes it's good,” he said.

“Yes.

“Sometimes it's not good?”

“Yes,” I said. “I suppose sometimes it's not good. I mean, it's not always the same.”

“It's not always the same.”

“It depends on a lot of things. How you're feeling. How she's feeling. What time of day it is. The weather.”

“It depends on the weather?”

“In a way,” I said. “Yes. It does. It depends on a lot of things.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Does it hurt whom?”

“Does it hurt the girl?”

“It can,” I said.

“Why can it?”

“If you're too rough,” I said.

“I wouldn't be too rough,” he said.

“I'm sure you wouldn't.”

“I wouldn't hurt her.”

“Listen, Alan,” I said, thinking, too late, I ought to end the conversation, which could lead only to more frustration and sadness for him. “It's not something to get all worked up about.”

“I am all worked up.”

“I know you are. I'm sorry.”

“You're not worked up about it, Ray, because you're old.”

“You may be right.”

“I may be right,” he said. “When you were my age, were you worked up about it?”

“Not really,” I said.

“Did you love Sara?”

“Very much.”

“Do you love me?”

“I do love you,” I said, before I had a chance to think about it.

“Do I love you?”

“I don't know.”

“I don't know either,” he said. “Do I love Anna?”

“She loves you. I know that.”

“I know that, too,” he said.

He didn't say anything for a minute. He may have been thinking about what I'd said, and/or coming to grips with my uselessness. Then he stood up and walked to the door. He turned to look at me. He held up the doll, intact.

“I made this,” he said.

“I know,” I said.

“You don't know.”

“I was watching you.”

“You weren't watching me,” he said.

“I was.”

“You weren't watching me. You weren't there,” he said. “I made this doll.”

He turned off the light.

W
e are just about out of time.

It is the 25th. We have—thirty days hath September—after this one, six days.

As I write this, Anna is in the kitchen making dinner, opening and closing cupboards and drawers, clanging pots, rattling flatware, trying desperately to keep herself occupied. Alan is in Anna's room. He locked himself in there this morning, when the Tall Man left, trailing havoc, and has not come out.

We have gone from the soup to the shit.

 

The Tall Man showed up about the time we'd finished breakfast. Alan was at the table looking over the Michelangelo bible, which I inscribed—beneath the Kolberg's inscription to their daughter—and gave to him as a gift. “To Alan:” I wrote. “My roommate, my brother, my friend. With admiration and affection. Ray.” Beneath that, “Calgary” and the date. Uninspired stuff. I'd bought the thing as a prop, under duress, and was merely handing it down. I watched Alan read the inscriptions. He made no comment. He seemed interested in the color plates. It had long been my plan to give him the bible when the time came.

“I'm sorry,” the Tall Man said. “Again I've come at your breakfast.”

“We've finished,” I said.

“Sit down,” Anna said.

“Thanks, I won't,” he said. “I'll not stay long. I've come to tell you, I regret to tell you, that your decision is academic now.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“I mean you can stay with Ray.” Glancing at Alan: “We've decided to take him.”

Alan did not look up from the bible.

“Take him?” Anna said.

“We think he's ready.”

“You can't take him.” Anna said.

“Of course we can.”

“He's not nearly ready,” Anna said. “I need more time with him.”

“We think he's ready. You have until the first of the month.”

“That's not enough time,” she said. “I promise I'll tell you when I think he's ready. I won't need too much longer.”

“It's not your decision,” he said. “I'm sorry. But there's no surprise here. This was the plan all along. Just a matter of when. I'll be back for him on the first. At noon. We'll expect you to have him packed.”

“Please don't do this,” Anna said. “Don't take him from me. There can't be such a rush.”

I was, belatedly, about to say something—no doubt callow and inflammatory—when Alan stood up.

“Listen to me,” he said.

“I'm listening,” the Tall Man said.

“I will not go with you.”

“You will go,” the Tall Man said.

“Where will you take him?” Anna said.

“I can't tell you that.”

“Let me come with him,” she said. “I can still be of use.”

“I'm sorry,” the Tall Man said. “I did what I could. It's my sense that you,
and
I, have become a nuisance. You can take consolation in this: he will be very useful. Very effective.”

“I will not be useful,” Alan said.

The Tall Man smiled. “You will not only be useful, son, you will be revolutionary. Transformative.”

“What did you say?”

“You will change everything.”

 

Late in the afternoon Anna came into my bedroom. She woke me up. We had not spoken since the Tall Man's visit.

“I've been trying to think of a way to keep them from taking him,” she said. “Some way to forestall it. He won't go willingly. We know that. They'll have to take him. I'm afraid they'll hurt him. Or he'll hurt himself.”

I humped myself up into a sitting position, my back against the crummy headboard.

“I should just take him and go,” she said. “Right away. Leave the country. We could move from place to place. You could help us, Ray. You could give us some money.”

“I would,” I said. “Of course. If that's what you decide to do.”

“I don't know,” she said. “I don't even know how far we'd have to go, or if we
could
go far enough.” She sat down on Alan's bed. “He won't go,” she said. “I know he won't.”

“Why won't he?” I said. “With you he'd go.”

“I don't think so. Not now. I'll tell you, Ray. I think he's decided to die.”

“What makes you think that?”

“I just think so,” she said. “Watching him, this morning.”

“I didn't see that, Anna,” I said. “He seemed pretty combative.”

“Maybe I could inflict some injury. The way boys used to shoot off their toes. I could do something that would make him useless.”

“Like what?” I said. “Cut out his tongue?”

“I couldn't do anything to cause him pain.”

“I know you couldn't.”

“Not even to save him from pain? Not even then?”

“I don't know, Anna.”

“Here's what I know,” she said. “I'm his friend. Maybe his first
friend. I'm his teacher. But I have no rights in this matter. I am not his mother. I'm not his wife. Or his lover.”

“Still,” I said.

“I am furious, Ray. With the Tall Man. With the group. I'm more furious with myself. My complicity. My naivete. For this, for them, I was willing to leave my own children behind. What sort of mother does that? For any reason. For any cause. For someone I'd never met. No matter how much he was you. What do I do, Ray? What would you do?”

“If I were you?”

“Yes,” she said. “Tell me something.”

“I would let him go. I would let them take him. You've done what you could. You've given him a year. You've cared for him very well. You've cared for me. Christ, you've been magnificent.”

“Thank you, Ray.”

“I'd let him go, Anna. And me. I'd let me go. I'd go back to my children.”

“I'd be putting them in danger,” she said.

“Ahhh,” I said. An old man's sound. A dismissive sound my father—he didn't live to be an old man—might make when he wasn't as sure as he wanted to seem. “There's got to be some way to do it.”

 

At dinner that night, last night—I write this after breakfast the following day, September 26—Alan offered me his heart. Anna and I were at the table. I was eating dinner; Anna couldn't bring herself to eat. Alan remained locked inside her bedroom. She'd announced three times at the bedroom door that dinner was ready. He did not respond. She was concerned he might do, might already have done, something to himself.

“I don't hear him in there,” she said to me. She pushed her chair back and stood up. “I'll be right back.”

She left the apartment. She was gone several minutes. “I went around the side of the building,” she said when she returned. She was daunted, out of breath, this woman who never flagged. “I thought I'd be able to see him through the window, but he had the curtains drawn.
A light was on. I rapped at the window, called his name. What do we do?”

“I guess we wait,” I said. “He'll come out. He'll get hungry, and he'll come out. You should eat something.”

“What if he's not all right?” she said. “Shouldn't we try to open the door?”

“How would we do that?”

“We could jimmy the lock,” she said. “There's a little hole in the knob. I've got a bobby pin.”

Before Anna's idea could be tested, as if thinking about fooling with the lock was enough to open the door, we heard Alan come out. He looked fine—calm and steady-eyed. I found his composure worrisome.

“Oh, thank goodness,” Anna said.

He approached the table. He did not sit down or speak. He stood facing us.

“Are you hungry?”

A simple question that, in the circumstances, sounded discordant.

“I am not hungry,” he said to her.

“Sit with us,” I said.

“I won't sit with you.” He looked at me, and said quietly, as though he didn't want Anna to hear, “I want to give you my heart.”

“No,” Anna said.

“I want you to take my heart,” he said to me.

“No,” Anna said more emphatically.

Alan persisted, not looking at Anna. “I want to give you my heart, Ray.”

Anna stood up. “Absolutely not,” she said. I was not surprised by her choice—or by how unhesitant and unqualified it was—and took no issue with it. “You just put that out of your mind,” she said.

“It is not
your
mind,” Alan said.

“I don't care,” she said. “I don't want you to say that again. I don't want you to think it.” She tried to take him in her arms, but he deflected her.

“I will think it,” he said. He hadn't raised his voice.

“You will not think it,” she said. “You will not say it.” She turned to me. “Ray?”

“Listen to me, Alan.” I stayed sitting. “I'm touched you would make such an offer. I'm happy, and I'm sad, at the same time, that you would say you want to give me your heart. I am happy you like me enough to say it. You are very generous to say it. It shows you are a good man. Which I already knew about you. But it makes me sad to hear you say it. I can't take your heart. I won't take your heart, because I like you, too. And because it would not be right.” I looked at Anna, who seemed to want me to enlarge. I could think of nothing else to say. I resorted to the sentiments and language of movies, and, though Alan would not have known this, debased us all. “You are a young man,” I said, “and you have most of your life left to live. I am an old man. I have already had my life. It would be wrong of me to take your heart, and I won't do it. But I am grateful to you. You are noble and very brave.”

I looked at Anna. Then, to Alan: “Okay?”

“No,” he said. “I am a clone.”

“That is true,” I said. “But you can be whatever you want.”

“I can be nothing else.”

“You can,” I said.

“I can't be you.”

“You wouldn't want to be.”

He looked at Anna.

“Please,” he said.

“No,” Anna said.

He looked at me.

“No, Alan,” I said.

That stood as the last word. Alan went back into Anna's bedroom and locked the door.

 

I've had a night and most of a day to think about Alan's offer, to which my response, in the moment, was derivative and glib, incommensurate. It is now late in the afternoon, and, except to use the bathroom—during these excursions, we thought it better not to waylay him—Alan
has been locked inside Anna's bedroom. We have not seen him eat in at least a day. Anna is afraid he is starving himself.