The Bradbury Report (8 page)

I don't remember all the questions Anna posed in that conversation. Nor can I be sure which of the questions I've tallied here were hers, and which are questions I've come up with, after the event. We know some of the answers now. Anna does, and her group, and I, per-force, do, too. Until we (I chafe at the pronoun) make public this information—this report is intended as the first step in a broad-based, multiform campaign of disclosure—and more so afterwards (when we are exposed and no longer of use), we are, Anna and I, in significant danger.

“So far as we know,” Anna said, “no one has been inside.” She was no longer beside me on the couch. As she began to unroll her sample questions, she stood up, just so she might pace slowly the width of the living room, back and forth between the wing chair and the double windows. Instinctively, I spread out, legs and arms, occupying as much of the couch as I could to discourage her sitting back down. With the enumeration of each successive question, she became more and more absorbed in her task, paid less attention to me. “And not once in twenty-five years has there been a creditable report of a clone come outside the Clearances. We have waited and watched for it. Religiously. As if we were a lunatic cult.”

“And you're not,” I am sorry to say I said.

Either she didn't hear this, or she ignored it. She stopped pacing. She sat down heavily in the wing chair, as though she had worn herself out.

What she said next, she said quietly, without affect. “We have a clone.”

For several seconds, I said nothing, I was irrational enough to think the clone Anna said they had might be Sara's, that this would explain Anna's coming to me. I confess this possibility, however macabre it might have proved if realized (Sara would be no older than twenty-one; I would be an enfeebled old man, not just unrecognizable
but unknown. I would mean nothing to her. For me, after the first delusory moments, it would be killing.), filled me with expectancy and something like physical desire. I knew it was not possible; Sara died before the replication program was initiated. “Where did you get it?” I said.

“Him,” Anna said. “I'm not sure. He came to us. Wandered off. Was misplaced. Found. I don't really know.”

“Escaped.”

“No. We don't think that's what happened. The concept of escape would have no meaning for a clone. We don't believe they'd have any reason to think there was anywhere to escape to, that there existed anything other than what they already knew. No idea of inside and outside. Escape, as an intentional act, would be inconceivable. It would be in the best interests of the government, and their enterprise, if this were so, and we believe it is so. I'm sorry. Did that sound prepared?”

“Yes.”

“Does it make sense?” she said.

“If you mean, ‘Can I follow the logic?' I can. But no. None of this makes sense. You came to spend a week with me because you found a clone.”

“I didn't find him. I don't know who did.”

“But you have him?”

“He was brought to me. He stayed with me six days. I don't have him now.”

“Who's got him?”

“He's somewhere safe.”

“Oh, good,” I said. “I'm relieved.” After forty-five years, through not a single effort of my own, I'd been given the chance to make some amends to Anna. Once again I was boorish. To this day, I have no idea why. Anna allows it might be something about her that irks me, but I will not let her take the blame.

“Listen, Ray. The entire system depends on one basic principle: originals must never meet, must never see, a clone. If such an encounter should take place, if one of us should run into one of them,
the effect would be to transform what is a conscionable, even, for some of us, a reassuring abstraction, into a thing literal and real. The consequences would be disastrous.”

“We believe this,” I said.

“We do,” she said. “We can believe nothing else. Look, you unpleasant, sullen old man. Just shut up. You will not keep me from saying what I want to say by being churlish.”

She left me no space to respond.

“If one clone has somehow got himself outside the Clearances, as has now happened, and there are some two hundred and fifty million clones inside the Clearances, it is a statistical certainty that, in twenty-five years, other clones have also got themselves out.”—I am mathematician enough to have known that Anna's assertion, though it might well be true, was a case not susceptible of statistical analysis, and that the very notion of ‘statistical certainty' is oxymoron. “If this
has
happened, and it has, it is not public knowledge. We don't know about it. And we would. So we've concluded that the system of tracking down and capturing any such wayward clones must be swift and sure, pitiless, unerring. We also believe that when a clone is captured, he is killed. No clone who has been outside the Clearances, who has experienced, no matter how briefly, what is outside, who knows that there is an outside, can be allowed to bring that knowledge back in.”

“They are killed?”

“Executed. Yes. They must be,” she said. “All useful parts would be harvested and banked.”

“After they are dead, presumably. You don't mean first.”

“We don't know. We do know nothing would be wasted.”

“You are sure about this?”

“We are as sure as we can be,” she said. “We are sure. I tell you this, because I want you to appreciate the danger we're in. The danger you're in.”

“Oh, for the love of Mike,” I said. “I am not in danger. I am not a damned clone.” Sadly, that is verbatim.

“Whenever a clone is captured, whoever is found to have helped or harbored him, whoever has recognized him for a clone, must also
be taken. We don't know what happens to
these
people. Maybe they are cut up for parts, then disposed of. The government would not balk at this. It would be a penalty to their taste, ruthless and condign: originals, for their crime against the state, made copies. In any case, you are most certainly in danger. And it is my fault.”

“Because of what you've told me.”

“Yes. And because of what I've come to ask you to do.”

“So what is it?”

“To start, we want you to meet with this clone.”

“
You
don't.”

“No,” she said. “I don't.”

“Why me?”

You will be wondering, here, how it was possible, at this late moment in the conversation, for me not to know what her answer would be. I will say only that I didn't know.

“The clone is yours,” Anna said.

T
his is how it turns out, with me all but confined to a bed in Calgary. Writing this report.

I am in Canada, having effectively traversed—a kind of forced march—that benevolent and enlightened country. Do I miss America? I do, yes. It is my home. Though I know very little of it, it is all I know. There are parts of northern New Hampshire and the Northeast Kingdom that for me are sacred places. I continue to make this claim to myself, though I am not sure it is true. Mount Cardigan, Mount Assurance, Mascoma Lake, Squam Lake, Zealand Hut at Zealand Falls at the base of Zealand Peak, Lake Willoughby. Even Weirs Beach on Winnipesaukee. I went to such places more than once with my father when I was a boy. My mother was never along. More than all else I remember the smell of conifers, the light at dawn and the mist in the morning thick on the lakes, the lakes like pearl in the moonlight, the snapping clearness of the night sky. Conventional stuff, I suppose. I'm afraid I remember these things better than I do my father, who has been dead a long time. When we first came back to New Hampshire to live, I took Sara to the White Mountains. She had lived most of her life in Indianola; she was appreciative. (When she'd lived several years in New England and had some basis for the comparison, she admitted she preferred the less exacting Greens, and Vermont in general—
“It just seems better groomed,” she said, as unemphatically as she could.) But in the forty-odd years intervening, I have not gone again to any of those spots. Maybe because they
are
sacred to me. After Sara died, and the baby, my infant son (thank God we had not named him), I pretty much stayed put. America is not easy to miss.

Too late, but I'd have liked, I think, to have lived, or died, by the sea.

These are the only words I remember from a song my mother sang to me. As her mother had sung it to her. When my mother sang it, and I was no longer an infant, I cringed at the grammatical rectitude of “You and I, you and I,” thinking she must have got it wrong, that, for every musical reason, it ought to go: “You and me, you and me, oh how happy we'll be.” She was right. The mistake was not hers. After her death, in a spurt of piety and the first flush of orphanhood—November 2027, I was in my early twenties—I looked it up. The song was more than one hundred years old, written in 1914 by Harold Atteridge (words) and Harry Carroll (music). Reading what I've written here, I see I have substituted, as I do always when I think of this song, when I sing these lines to myself, the word “long” in the third sentence for the “love” of the original. I prefer my version.

I was born and raised and, after college and graduate school, spent all my adult life in western New Hampshire, as far, in that state, from the Atlantic littoral as one could be. My mother and father and I would once or twice a summer make the drive to the shore, to Hampton Beach, where, even then, the water was full of sewage and runoff, industrial and medical waste, all sorts of marine garbage, and a tarry sludge that stuck to the bottom of your feet. You would get sick swimming in that water, though hordes of very wealthy people swam there. I wasn't much of a swimmer. I didn't at all like being in the ocean. I
didn't like not knowing what I might be stepping on, what might be scuttling around my feet. My mother was an enthusiast and a strong swimmer. If you wanted to swim in clean, non-toxic water, you had to drive up the coast into Maine, to be safe, as far north as, say, Booth-bay, and then the water would be too cold until late in the summer. In college, I was not too far from the Chesapeake Bay, and, in the spring of my freshman year, I went several times to Virginia Beach with two boozy, showy boys from Nashville. In my sophomore year, I went with Ann—in our final, apocalyptic phone call, she used the word “discarded” to describe what I had done to her—to a place on the Eastern Shore called Chance. Iowa is landlocked, of course, and the two years I spent there in graduate school—the first of which as an engine of dismay for Anna—I didn't see the sea.

I have just ended a year on the run, living in close quarters—for me a year of unprecedented intimacy—with Anna and, in one person, a genetic facsimile of myself and a recognizable version of myself as a twenty-one-year-old. I have claimed, in the spurt of self-abasement with which I began, that this report will not be about me; but it is no accident, no surprise that, from time to time, my past will seem to intrude upon the narrative, will want to infiltrate, to subvert the express and more than sufficient purpose of this report. It appears I will not keep it out, that I will welcome it, solicit it. When your parents are gone, when your wife is gone, when you have no children who survive, no family at all, no friends, when there is no one who shares your past, no one who remembers it, then, for all you can prove, or even determine, your past might as well never have been. It might never have been. This report, whoever's idea it was I write it, whatever use others will make of it, however reluctant I was at the start, is my report now.

 

When Anna told me, “The clone is yours”—a crystalline, phase-shifting point beyond which nothing would for either of us ever be the same—I did not respond as you'd expect. I did not say, as might some half-cooked, pasteboard character in a novel, anything remotely like, “Mine? The clone is mine? What do you mean?” In the instant she
said, “The clone is yours,” I moved past any confusion, past any doubt about the veracity of her statement. “You've seen him?” I said.

“I have.”

“He looks like me?” An unscientific question, more than a trace narcissistic, but I was steady. I could have had no real idea what I was facing.

“He looks just like you.” She smiled. “Like you used to look. A bit bigger.”

“Taller?”

“Taller. Broader.”

“He's twenty-one,” I said.

“That's right,” she said. “You're a whiz.”

“I'm not. The doctor asked me about it. About him. What is his name?”

“I don't know. We don't think he has a name,” she said. “It's a terrible thing. I don't know what to call him.”

“But he's all right?”

I don't think I yet felt for the clone any kind of proprietary concern, which, directed towards the clone, would also constitute a new and misbegotten opening for the propagation and expression of self-love. In the swamplands of self-love, it happens, I am a pioneer.

“He's all right,” she said. “He's bewildered. Scared. He was completely narcotized when he was found. Full of drugs. That's been hard. He's just now coming off them. Just now coming clear.”

“What kind of drugs?”

“All kinds,” she said.

“They
found
him?”

“Yes.”

“Who did? You?”

“No,” she said. “I didn't find him.”

“Who did then?”