The Bradbury Report (44 page)

The first thing to say about it, his offer, is that it was no mere gesture. If I was willing to accept his heart (Anna would have killed me first), he would give it to me. He understands about death, and, from his conversations with Anna subsequent to our telling him who he was, he knows he would surely die if his heart is taken. By any measure, his offer was heroic.

What I can't quite work out is why he made the offer. Even if Anna is right, and he does care more about me than he lets on, that doesn't explain why he is willing to die so that I might gain a few more unproductive, superfluous years.

There is this: Alan's willingness to sacrifice himself for me, and by doing so, to live out his purpose as a clone, is nothing short of revolutionary, and, thus, paradoxically, fully human. It would be almost certainly the first and only time a clone would have served his original by choice, as an act of free will. The first time, for that matter, a clone would have exercised his free will in
any
meaningful way. He might not be able to articulate it, but I think on some level Alan knows this.

This, too: having heard us talk about it, Alan understands that, when he somehow came free of the Clearances, he became, irreversibly, a grave and intolerable threat to the government. So that now, wherever he goes, they will pursue him without letup until he is captured, and that, once captured, he will be executed. He knows, too, more proximately, what his life will be like for however long he is to survive under the protection of Anna's group. If they have him—they already have him—and have their way, he will be “celebrated” wherever they permit him to surface. He will be the public face of the movement. He will be required to speak out against the idea of cloning and clones. To speak out against himself. To be his own nemesis. Safe to say that Alan would want neither of these alternatives. I believe he preferred to help me, rather than to die at the hands of his makers, or to be pitilessly traduced at the hands of his keepers.

I don't mean by this in any way to devalue his offer, just to understand
it. I think if he was able or willing to talk about it, he would acknowledge that, given the alternatives he is facing, his decision to give me his heart was not simply “heroic.” I think his decision was meant to approximate an instance of altruism, to (forgive me) replicate it, and thereby to enter, or almost enter, the human community of human selves. Which community, which version of selfhood, he idealizes and sadly overestimates. But I believe he sees giving me his heart as the only way he can participate in a human life he will, otherwise, have no chance to live.

If Alan was in my position, needing a heart, and I was in his, with a healthy heart to give, would I make the offer? I would not.

 

Three days have passed. It is now September 29. The interim has been fraught. I have not written a word.

When Alan reappeared—he'd stayed closeted and we'd not seen him since he'd made his offer the night before—it was dinnertime, on the 26th. We'd finished our meal, but were still at the table. Alan sat down as if nothing of moment had passed between us. He asked Anna if there was anything left to eat.

“You must be starving,” she said.

“I am starving,” he said.

Anna made up a plate and put it in front of him.

“Thank you,” he said. “This will taste good to me.”

I believe, at this point, Anna knew what was coming next, what Alan had decided to do. I was happy to see him eating, as was Anna, but I—not the deepest diver—did not think to think about any decision he might have been meditating.

His demeanor, I would have said, was pleasant and entirely un-foreboding. When he'd done eating, he said there was something he wanted to ask us. He was courteous enough to include me, but it was Anna he wanted to speak to.

“How do I die?” he said to her. He was calm. He might have been asking where we kept the cereal.

“What are you asking me?” Anna said. She knew full well.

“I'm asking you, ‘How do I die?' I don't know how to die. How do you do it? You tell me.”

“There is no reason for you to die,” she said.

“There is not no reason,” he said. “How do you do it, Anna?”

This exchange began a discussion about Alan's determination to die that lasted the better part of two days, and was exhausting for Anna, less so for me (Alan was inexhaustible), and in which discussion—I participated, between irresistible naps, as a kind of subaltern—we were able to say nothing either to dissuade or divert him from his resolve. Afterwards, Anna insisted we agree to talk no more about it, so as not to wreck the time we had left, however it ended.

At some latter point in the conversation, Anna did reluctantly address his initial and persevering question. “When the time comes,” she said to him, “if you still want to do it, I will find a way for you.”

“I will still want to do it,” Alan said.

“I hope you won't,” she said. “I pray you won't.”

“When will the time come?”

“We have until the thirtieth to decide.”

“What day is today?” he asked me, the mathematician.

I thought about lying to him, rigging the game, but I told him what day it was.

“We have four days,” he said, and from that moment, he kept scrupulous track.

Anna tried to find ways they could pass the time they had left together with some steadiness, some peace of mind—
her
steadiness,
her
peace of mind; Alan was steady and at peace—ways, more or less, to keep him, them, occupied. (In bed most of the time, I was not much of a diversion.) “I feel like Scheherazade,” she said to me, then had to explain the allusion. She knew her plan—wholly ad hoc, seat of the pants—in the end amounted to nothing other than a plan to turn him over to the group. She needn't have tried so hard. She was not happy or at peace, not for a moment, no matter what they did. However short the time would be, for her it was purgatory. And Alan, irrespective of her efforts, was, except for scattered moments of frustration,
happier than we'd ever seen him. He was unfailingly good company. He spent some time sitting on the bed opposite mine—Anna had reinstalled herself in my bedroom—and, in my presence, he did no brooding or stewing, showed no fear or regret. Admirable boy, he was self-contained. He didn't speak of his, if he followed through, impending death. He grew increasingly, unnervingly peaceful, until, at the last, he was so serene, Anna said, it broke her heart.

The 28th was a Sunday, and Anna took him to church, a Lutheran church not far from the apartment. “Besides us,” she told me later, “there was almost no one there. I gave no commentary on what was going on. Where would I have begun? We had not talked about God. Maybe that should have been the first thing we talked about.”

That evening, the three of us were at the table, having dinner together. Alan asked us what was the best time we'd had together, Anna and I, when we were young. Anna told him about the day we spent driving around northwestern Iowa in my old Volvo, and about stopping at that roadhouse in Le Mars for steaks and sweet potato fries. Alan wanted to know if sweet potato fries were different from the french fries he ate at every opportunity. Anna told him. She told him, also, that years later, long after I'd left Iowa for New Hampshire, with Sara, that she and her husband would go dancing at that same roadhouse.

“I would like to dance,” Alan said.

I thought he was merely musing. So did Anna, apparently.

“I would like to dance,” Alan said again, looking at Anna.

“With me, you mean?” she said. “You want to dance with me?”

Once, early in our domestic adventure with Alan, Anna told me, “There are too many times with him, when I say something, something I believe is innocent, guileless, and I hear how flirty it sounds.” There was nothing flirtatious about her now.

“Yes,” he said. “I would like to dance.”

Anna found some music on the radio, and they danced in the living room of the apartment. I recognized the song they danced to. It was “Dandelion Wine.” Anna tried to teach him the box step, but he couldn't get it. He was clumsy and self-conscious—the floor was carpeted,
which didn't help—and seemed to have almost no rhythm. I was self-conscious, too, watching them dance—I was surprised he'd let me watch—and would have been, in his place, equally clumsy. Alan quickly got frustrated, and they stopped.

Anna was desperate he not feel defeated. Before he could go to his room, she said, “Hold on, Alan.”

“What?” he said.

“Would you like a girl?” she said. “Would you like me to get you a girl?”

“You're a good dancer,” he said. “I'm the bad one.”

“You're not bad,” she said. “You're inexperienced. You haven't danced before. You'll be good. But I don't mean that.”

“I won't be good,” he said. “What did you mean?”

“I mean, do you want me to get you a girl?”

“A girl to dance with?”

“A girl to be with,” she said.

Alan looked at her. He was incredulous. You could see him think it over. Then he said, “No, thank you.”

When Alan had gone to his room, Anna turned to me and said, “Can you believe it?”

“Can I believe what? That you offered to get him a girl? Or that he turned you down?”

“Both,” she said. “Either. If he'd wanted me to, I would have figured out how to do it. You would have told me.”

“I wouldn't have known,” I said.

“Well, I would have done it. I think I would. Can you believe it?”

“No,” I said.

 

Alan is dead. He died last evening, the 30th of September, at approximately ten o'clock. He was twenty-one, or twenty-two. We can't be sure how old he was. Anna and I were with him. He'd decided to die, and we cooperated, helped him do it.

We'd thought it through. The three of us. Alan was thinking clearly. I was floored by the clarity, the acuteness of his thought. He was calm and, in his fashion—which I'd grown accustomed to and, impersonating
him in this report, fond of—articulate. He was analytic. “It was like listening to you,” Anna said before she left. “The way you talked, back in Iowa, when you used to talk, when you were interested in ideas, in people. Like you at your most alive and direct, least qualifying.”

By the end—some days before the end, really—Alan had become fixed, unshakeable in his intention. There was nothing we could say, nothing we could do, except refuse our help, to stop him. (It's not clear how he might have proceeded without our help.) Anna's position—she held it to the end—was that she didn't want him to do it, no matter what might happen once they took him. Still, when it came time, she helped him. Because—about this there was no doubt—she loved him, and didn't want him to suffer. I had no position. I preferred neither of the possible outcomes, found them both objectionable. (“Objectionable?” “Prefer?”) There was no choice to make—his was a choiceless choice—but I think, in part, perhaps, because
I
was ready to die, he made the right one. But I didn't want him to suffer. I would try to be of use.

 

We were with him. Anna handed him the pill. She filled the glass with water. Menial tasks that made her his executioner, me her accomplice. Say what you want, we are responsible for his death. I watched him die. His head was in Anna's lap.

Anna thought to make the night of the 30th routine and uneventful, slow and sleepy and idle, on the ghost of a chance that Alan had lost track of the date. I believed what she had in mind for the next morning, should we all get through the night, was to plead with the Tall Man to give her just a little more time.

We ordered out for pizza and ate it in front of the television. I can't tell you what we watched. I watched Anna. She was agitated, alert to Alan's mood and behavior, tracking the time.

A little before nine, Alan stood up. “I'm going to my room,” he said.

“Are you going to bed?” Anna said.

“I'm not going to bed.”

“Will you come back out?” she said. “Shall we wait for you?”

“Yes,” he said. “Wait for me.”

It took Anna only a few minutes to clean up from dinner—she went at it as though her life, somebody's life, was at stake—just a pizza box to flatten and dispose of, three plates and glasses to wash. As she finished, Alan came back into the room. He was wearing my clothes. A pair of my dark dress slacks, a white button-down shirt of mine, and my sport coat, the glen plaid. He was in his stocking feet, in his own socks. He was holding one of the two ties I'd brought with me. I'd not worn either of them.

“You look smart,” I said.

“What did you say?” he said.

“You look good,” I said.

“Handsome,” Anna said.

He held the tie out to her. “I don't know how to tie it. Will you tie it?”

“If I can remember how,” she said. “What about you, Ray?”

“You do it,” I said.

“I used to do this for my husband,” she said, “and for my boys. It's been a while.” To Alan: “Come here to me.”

He did as she asked.

“First we need to unbutton your collar.”

“My collar is unbuttoned,” he said.

“I mean these two little buttons here.” She undid the buttons at the points and turned up the collar. He tilted his head all the way back to give her room to work. “There,” she said. “Now turn around.”

“Why?”

“That's the only way I know how to do it,” she said.

He stood with his back to Anna. She reached around his neck and tied the tie. She made a simple knot, nothing fancy. It was better than I could have done. “Face me now,” she said. She buttoned the collar down, then pulled up the knot and straightened the tie. “Step back,” she said. “I want to look at you.”