The Bradbury Report (6 page)

“Of course, for you. And for me. And others.”

“Others?”

She did not respond. I saw no way to force her to talk about what had brought her. In truth, I didn't care, so long as it was done. I would have been happier if she left without telling me. I couldn't imagine it was anything, given how I was feeling, I needed to be concerned with. I was ill, perhaps critically. I was frightened by what had happened to me. I wanted to rest, to be quiet. Just that. More than once, in the course of the following day, I was at the point of asking her to leave. (It would have done no good. There was only one thing
I might have said to cause her to go, to give up on me, and I could not have known what it was.) I believed—I was surely right—that Anna's presence, made more taxing by her unexplained, inexplicable, behavior, was dangerous to me. I said this to her. “It's not good for me. It can't be good. It's too soon for me to manage this. It feels heartless of you.”

“I know it does,” she said. “I am so sorry. I didn't expect to find you this way. If I had known, I would have postponed my trip.”

“What about that?
Might
we do this another time? Some other way?”

“I don't think so.”

We had several such fruitless and circular conversations, each one more inane than the last. Anna prepared our meals. She stayed with me one week. Every morning, she drove some distance—I now participate, wholeheartedly, in the hugger-mugger—on the interstate to the giant food nexus, buying only what we needed for that day, so she could carry the stuff to the house from her truck, which she continued to park on a residential street, several streets off. I was restricted to a bland diet. She fixed me broiled skinless chicken breasts, plain pasta, boiled potatoes, toast, clear soup, green Jell-O, hospital food, which Anna rendered—I have to say—quite palatable. I slept intermittently throughout the day, sometimes several hours at a stretch. In part, because I was often unable to stay awake, in part because it was trying to spend so much time in the house with a near stranger. Anna did laundry, did the dishes, kept the place orderly and clean, read the newspaper, watched television, read the books she'd brought with her. We spent much of my waking time apart. I closeted myself in the study, which, as I've said, was not characteristic of me. When we were together, for meals and at other times, Anna talked about her three kids, her grandchildren, and her late husband. We'd both had long careers—hers evidently more satisfying—as teachers, and, though I wasn't eager, we talked some about that. She insisted I tell her about Sara, and I did, though guardedly at first. It felt good, and right, to describe for Anna, room by room, just how different the house had
looked and felt and smelled, when Sara was alive, how little in it or about it, now, was telling of her. Anna was animated when we talked about Sara, and it was obvious that she, too, had loved her. It was only this shared affection, I think—whatever the difference in degree—that kept me, finally, from abjuring all dictates of courtesy and, supposing I was able to do it, throwing her out.

B
efore Anna's first visit—she would be back, having assured herself I could be trusted, though she remained, with regard to my safety and my emotional and physical equilibriums (to say nothing of her own vulnerabilities), apprehensive and more than ambivalent about involving me—I knew next to nothing about the universe of cloning. Except on the one day of the American year prescribed for ritualized remembrance, for the national experience and expression of what, on the occasion of the very first Louise Brown Day, some undersecretary mawkishly called “original gratitude,” I never thought about it, gratefully or otherwise—not about cloning, nor about the race of clones. (“Race” is self-evidently wrong, but I can think of no other word. Species? Subspecies? Metaspecies? Paraspecies? The practice beggars taxonomy.) Least of all—model citizen, I—did I think about
my
clone. My
copy,
as we are meant to say, and to think.

About the issue of cloning, I'd been apathetic. Even so, I'd always found the holiday—I've been around for them all—discomforting and sinister. Its very name, I now see, was, like all the authorized nomenclature, cunningly chosen to mislead and trivialize. As most of us have forgotten or never knew, Louise Joy Brown, born July 25, 1978, was the first human product of in vitro fertilization. She was not a clone. She was the sexually reproduced daughter of two parents. She lived
and died a postal worker in England, where human cloning has always been outlawed. She had only obliquely, “inspirationally,” to do with cloning. This may be one reason why, despite governmental dicta, the day has come more commonly to be called, especially among children, “Dolly Day.” Which translation—chillingly apt—led inevitably to the surreal and grisly scene of summer streets filled at dusk with flocks of children in pink or white sheep suits, in their woolly innocence folded among debauched bands of grown men and women, conspicuously drunk, in bizarre, I'd say monstrous, sheep's-head masks. (I remember my grandfather, an inveterate Live Free or Die Yankee who fought in the shameful war in Vietnam and somehow survived it, in his dotage telling me about southern boys in his platoon who'd claimed to have had, as he slyly put it, congress with sheep.) The unseemly pack of them, children and parents, prancing and cavorting, raucously bleating deep into the night. Imagine at this the sweet twins next door. Sophie and Marie. I have seen them.

I knew nothing—and still know very little—about what goes on inside the Clearances. (This name is
not
misleading. It is meant to be forbidding.) Almost no one knows anything. Not even those who, like Anna, live in contiguous towns and villages. (You'd think it would take a concerted effort for them
not
to know, living on the border. Remember the assiduous ignorance of the citizens of Dachau, the sleepy town of that name. Anna assures me the opposite is true.) Not even the sedulous, sparse, and painfully ineffectual resistance, of which Anna is a low-level part. Many of her fellow dissenters, living purposefully as near as they can to the boundary, have devoted their lives to investigating the unholy business transacted there. So far as is known, none of them has ever gained access to the Clearances. (And lived to speak of it?) None of them had ever encountered a clone or seen one from a distance. (There are two public roads in the Clearances. They bisect the territory, north to south and west to east. I have, one time, driven the length—it was go the whole way or turn around—of the north-south route, from Valentine in Nebraska, through what once was Minot, and into Canada. By design, one can see nothing from these roads, except vast open fields and the occasional collocation of
abandoned houses and commercial buildings.) Not one of them has ever met or spoken with anyone even tangentially involved with cloning. No one has. In this respect, these abolitionists, Anna's compatriots, are exactly like the rest of the population, including, it is generally believed, those in the very highest reaches of government. The best the abolitionists could do, even aided as they were by anti-cloning, anti-American thinkers from abroad, the nearest they could come to an accurate or even approximate sense of life, if the word applies, inside the Clearances, was informed speculation, basing their guesses, and the elaborated schema derived from them, on what was known about the science and technology of cloning, and, more determinatively, on fundamental and empirically verifiable assumptions about the way the government thinks and acts (that is, pragmatically, cynically, venally) and about what invariably motivates it (that is, profit).

As would be true for any American my age, I remember the riots in North and South Dakota. It was a bitter political fight (in a more passionate, less fatalistic age, there would have been civil war) between the states and the federal government, over the latter's attempt—wielding the doctrine of eminent domain, pushing it far past, despotically past, it was widely felt, its legal and already flagrantly overextended bounds—to appropriate the entirety of what were the Dakotas as an integral part of the process, the government's depopulation of those two states, in the space of four years, forcibly evicting all the “original” residents—one and a half million of them: men, women, children, and their chattel—giving these flinty heartlanders top dollar for their houses (which were summarily razed) and businesses, and adequately funding their relocation. All of this in order to repopulate the subsequently renamed territory with clones, and all the high- and low-tech ordnance of the cloning enterprise. When this happened, I was in my early forties, living alone in New Hampshire, far from the theater of conflict.

When Sara and I were on our honeymoon in Scotland, in the Trossachs, on Loch Voil, I read—by pure chance—one quiet afternoon while Sara was napping, an historical novel about the Highland
Clearances. I might have been outside; the afternoon was fine. I chose instead to remain indoors, near Sara, in our bedroom, to be near her. To watch her sleep was, still, a new and almost discomposing delight. In sleep her face was—this said without irony or self-parody—beatific. Her hands by her head on the pillow were pretty and delicate. I felt blessed by this woman, by her physical presence, her spirit, by her incomprehensible willingness to love me. (The language is religious. I was not.) I felt lucky, beyond all just expectation. This was nearly two decades before the government's decision to confiscate the land of North and South Dakota. When I still read books.

We were staying in a sixteenth-century great house, what seemed to us a small castle, made of a rose-colored stone, set back maybe a hundred yards from the shore of the loch. It was mid-September. We were married September 12. It is a day, a date, that has kept its power. The mornings there were cold and misty, the afternoons clear, the light off the loch unearthly. “Fourth dimensional,” Sara said, by which she meant not Time, but the supranatural clarity of things. By nature she was reticent and self-contained—I loved this in her—and not given to such pronouncements. At breakfast, in addition to the eggs and sausage and bacon, there was fried bread that came slotted in a silver rack. We had never, either of us, seen fried bread before. There was also a kind of oatcake—very dry and stiff, barely edible—squat jars of homemade preserves, clotted cream, and a quilted tea cozy done up like a Cheshire cat. We ate everything. We were a week in the Trossachs, then another week down in Edinburgh and the Borders.

The book I read that afternoon was called
The Highland Clearances
—according to the back of the jacket, it was popular in its day. It retailed a series of events, especially brutal, and entirely unknown to me, that occurred in the north of Scotland in the late-eighteenth and early-ninteenth centuries, when, by force of arms—bayonet, truncheon, pike, fire—the English removed from their homes tens of thousands of men, women, and children, in order to make room for their, the English's, grandiose vision involving the large-scale farming of sheep. The book was written by a man named Prebble—Richard or Robert or John—sometime, I think, in the second half of the last century.
I remember this name, because at the end of our honeymoon, fourteen supernal, irrecoverable days, the night before we were to fly from Glasgow back to Boston, we stayed at a bed-and-breakfast, unforgettably elegant, near the English border, in the sweetly named town of Peebles.

During the abysmal, godforsaken years when the Dakotas were evacuated (another state-engendered euphemism, as if the land, itself, was dangerous), the prior and analogous event was, so far as I recall, never invoked by either side. (Is there today anyone—excepting professional historians, diehard clansmen, and those like Anna, those, I mean, with whom she is in league, who make it their business to know such things—who knows anything about the Highland Clearances?) It must be that whichever functionary came up with the new and official name for the erstwhile Dakotas was at least somewhat familiar with the Scottish instance. Was the choice of name cynical? (Could the name, the concept it revived, have given rise to the action?) Was it sardonic? Coldly, recklessly arrogant? Psychopathic? Can a state be psychopathic? We know it can.

On Wednesday evening, as we were going to bed (I need not say: she to her bedroom, I to mine), Anna told me that, because I'd been in the hospital nearly all of the first three days she was in New Hampshire, she was extending by one day her stay with me. If I didn't object. I did object. I would have been overjoyed to hear she was cutting short her visit. But I was unwilling to say so. Her plan had been to arrive one Saturday and leave the next. Now she would stay until Sunday.

However pushy or presuming I've made her sound, Anna was not once during her stay—nor has she been since—insensitive. She was, and is, careful, painstaking about my feelings. In all other ways, too, painstaking. Until the minute she began to say what she had come to say, she was perplexed about how, or when, best to say it. Rightly, she felt she needed to spend enough time with me—was a week enough time, given, especially, how standoffish I'd been in her presence?—to be able to assess the kind of man I had become. She was unwilling to rely on impressions, less so on feelings, some forty-five years
old. Having heard her out, how would I respond? What would I do? I prefer to believe—Anna assures me it is true—she was not afraid I would betray her. To pose the question starkly: was I emotionally, and now, physically up to hearing what she would say, to face what she would bring me to face, up to being and doing what she would ask? She wasn't sure, despite her unwavering certainty about the justness of her cause, despite the categorical nature of her charge (which included no trace of concern for my welfare), that she had the right to involve me, to put me, in several ways, at serious risk.

That Friday night—the second-to-last night of her time with me—Anna initiated the fateful conversation, in which, for my own peace of mind, I had willed myself to lose all interest.