The Bradbury Report (32 page)

I woke the next night at one a.m. This was premeditated. I was on the case. Like some Puritan elder. I could have let him be. I was not his father; but—this is the truest way to characterize my relationship to him—I
was
his keeper. His keeper's assistant. However I might have construed my role, it surely did not include this kind of surveillance and intervention. For the third night in a row that I knew of, Alan was not in his bed. I peeked into the living room. He was there, and busy. I did nothing to make him aware of me. I went to the bathroom, then straight back to bed. After a while I heard him pottering around in the kitchen. It sounded like he might be making himself a sandwich—he liked peanut butter and jelly—something he'd begun to
do. I was still awake when he came back to bed. I decided to speak to Anna in the morning.

While Alan was occupied watching one of his pre-breakfast shows—something farcical about a family of human-looking robots—I told Anna what I had seen. She was, at first, furious with him and, by association, with me.

“Get out of my way,” she said. We were standing in the kitchen. She was in her nightgown and robe. Her hair, which she'd started to grow out, was in an unruly intermediate stage and, especially in the morning, made her look ashen and wild. “I'm going to talk to him.”

“Maybe
we
should talk first,” I said.

“You just let him do it?”

“What do you mean ‘
let
him'?”

“You didn't say anything?”

“I didn't have to. He stopped when I came in. Turned off the TV. Packed up. Went to bed.”

“What did he say?”

“He said nothing.”

“Did you see what he was watching?”

“Some.”

“How bad was it?”

“I guess it was pretty bad,” I said. “I don't know how to rate it.”

“This is not good,” she said. “I have to talk to him.”

“What will you say?”

“I have no idea. I didn't expect this. Did you expect this?”

“I had no expectations,” I said. “You raised boys.”

“They didn't do this.”

“Masturbate?”

“Pornography,” she said. “Just let me think a minute.” She opened a cabinet and took out a tumbler, then took some orange juice out of the refrigerator and poured herself a glass.

She took a sip and made a face. “Oh, that's tart,” she said. She put the glass down on the counter. “We never had this problem.” She shook her head. “Forgive me. I shouldn't have snapped at you. It's not your fault.”

“I'm pretty sure it's not,” I said.

“What do you think about this?”

“I don't know what I think,” I said. “It's awkward.”

“Did you do this?”

“Do what?”

“Watch pornography?”

“It never interested me.” I said.

She put the carton of juice back into the refrigerator and poured the juice from her glass into the sink. “This stuff is awful,” she said. “Let's remember not to get it again.” She rinsed the glass under the tap, then put it in the drain board. “This may be my fault.”

“How could that be?” I said.

“What I did for him.”

“Oh,” I said. “I don't think so.” It occurred to me that this must be the way parents talk. “It's no one's fault, Anna.”

“I'm not sure,” she said. “What do I say to him?”

“I don't know. Tell him why you find it objectionable. Tell him how it makes you feel to know he's watching it.”

“What if you spoke to him?” she said. I had never before seen her flinch. “You're a man.”

“It would be more powerful, I think, coming from you.” This was not only a dodge; I believed it to be true.

I saw her gather herself. She straightened her spine, set her jaw. She really did these things. “I'll clean up,” she said, “get some clothes on. Then I'll talk to him.”

“Do you want me there?”

“You choose,” she said.

Anna reappeared when Alan and I were sitting at the table having breakfast. I'd cooked some oatmeal for the two of us. Alan had come to take his with raisins and brown sugar; I liked mine with just a jigger's worth of milk. Anna had showered and dusted herself with a fresh-smelling powder. She smelled clean. She'd brushed her hair and put on lipstick. She had on a flowered, knee-length skirt she'd not worn in my presence, and a white cotton man-tailored shirt, short-sleeved, open at the throat. Her feet were bare. It was the heart of the
Winnipeg winter, and she was dressed for a Virginia spring. She had no intention of going out this way. She looked good. I thought she looked as good as I'd ever seen her look.

It seemed to me that a small part, at least, of Anna's response to Alan's brief experiment with pornography—it was brief: after Anna spoke to him, he did not watch it again—had to do with her having hurt feelings. She was, it remains reasonable to believe, the first, and for a time afterwards, the only woman Alan had ever seen, and, more to the point, the only woman with whom, however qualifiedly, he'd been sexual. (The instance, I suspect, more momentous for Anna than for Alan.) By now, though, six months on, she'd been eclipsed in Alan's adult imaginings, if not in his child's heart—superseded in youth and beauty and sexual appeal (cast aside?)—by two generations of younger women, both those he saw on television, before and after midnight, and those he saw on the streets of Ottawa and Winnipeg. I don't know how Anna really felt about this. I never asked her, and she never spoke of it.

When the breakfast mess had been cleared and washed—Anna skipped breakfast that morning—the dishes put away, she asked Alan to sit with her in the living room.

“Why?” He said this without peevishness.

“I want to talk to you.”

“Okay,” he said.

Alan sat down in the middle of the couch, his customary spot, facing the TV, which was not on. Anna sat beside him, turned sideways so she could face him. He continued to look straight ahead, not intending by this, I'm quite sure, to be rude. I sat down in the wing chair between the windows. My aim was to help if Anna needed me—she didn't—otherwise to remain unobtrusive.

“Alan,” she said. “I want to talk to you about something that's making me sad.”

“Are you sad?” he said.

“I am,” she said. “But I'm not angry. I want you to know that. I'm not angry with you.”

“Okay,” he said. So far, he didn't seem much perturbed.

“I don't like what you watch on television,” she said.

If he looked any way at all, it was mildly confused.

“I mean, what you watch at night.”

Still, there was no sign he knew what she was talking about.

“What you watch when we're asleep.”

He smiled. He was interested now.

“I don't like you watching it.”

“I want to fuck a girl,” he said.

“Now just hold on,” she said. She put her face closer to his. “In the first place, we can't have that kind of language. You and I have talked about this. I'm sure you remember. Do you remember?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Then you must stop. Right now. No more of that.”

“How do
you
say it?” He included me in this question.

“I don't say it,” I said.

“That's a very good question,” she said to him, making it clear she'd not found my response productive. “Someday, maybe it will be soon, you will meet a girl.” I believe this was something she'd planned to say as the happy end of her disquisition. “You will get to know her. You will like her, and she will like you. If you're kind and gentle and considerate, which I know you will be, and if you're lucky, she will love you. You are always lucky to be loved. If you love her, and if, after a time, she wants to do what you want to do, then you will do it. What the two of you will do will be something fine and good and sweet. When we talk about that, we say ‘making love.' ”

“Which is not what you've seen on TV,” I said.

Alan paid no attention to me. You could see him trying to make sense of what Anna had said. By this time Alan had more than a nominal understanding of what love was—I believe, in his way, he loved Anna—but the idea of
making
it appeared to stump him.

Finally, in frustration—it was cumulative—he said, “I want a girl to fuck.” This was so heartfelt as to be inoffensive. “Why can't I have one?”

Anna softened even further. “You will have one,” she said. “Someday you will. I promise. And no more of that language. Okay?”

“Yes,” he said.

Anna set out the arguments, moral and political, against pornography, a term Alan hadn't heard before, and one she didn't insist he acquire. The arguments were familiar—the objectification, the dehumanization of women, the promotion of violence against them, the devaluation of sex, of physical and emotional intimacy, the suffering and sadness all around, etc. In her brief, Anna took pains to use language that was simple and clear. I found the arguments none the less compelling for their familiarity and simplicity. I can't say how Alan found them, though, as I've said, they certainly, and immediately, had the desired effect. What surprised and impressed me most was that Anna was willing to talk to Alan about, citing him as an example, her first boyfriend, the one she'd met in college, a psychopath and pornography addict, named Wilf. Without going into detail, she spoke about his cruel treatment of her, but also, with some charity, about the great waste and tragedy of his life. (The next time we were alone, I asked her if she knew what had happened to Wilf after college. She said she didn't know, and didn't want to know.)

When it was clear that Anna had said all she felt she needed to say on the subject, I said, “That was good. You did that well.”

“Thanks,” she said. “I hope so. I'm not sure.”

“No,” I said. “That was very skillful.”

“Did I make any sense?”

“I think you did. Perfect sense.”

“What do you think?” she asked Alan. “Is there anything you don't understand? Do you have any questions?”

Alan was hard to read. He had listened patiently and attentively, I thought, but he sat there largely without affect.

“Did you understand what I was saying?” Anna said

“Yes,” he said. He might have. Then, looking straight at Anna, he said, “They like it.”

“Who does?” she said.

“The girls. They like making love.”

“How can you say that?” she said.

“They smile,” he said. “They all smile.”

 

Before we left Ottawa for Winnipeg—the drive was long, and we spent a night in a Thunder Bay motel—the Tall Man took our green Chinese car, which was a piece of junk that, in our care, had gotten junkier, and, in its stead, gave us a relatively new and spruce Tagore van. At the end of our stay in Winnipeg, the van, which we hated to lose, was replaced by an Oldsmobile Redux, a ponderous old sedan. We were in the Redux, on the way from Winnipeg to Regina. Anna was driving, and Alan was asleep in the backseat. It was the beginning of March and still very cold. A sunny, dry day, but the roads were dusted with snow blowing off the fields, the air glittery. In the interests of furthering my education, and passing the time, Anna was talking about what might have happened—was, she said, about to happen—had the government not taken cloning out of the hands of the corporate practitioners: the cloning process commercialized; cloned children commoditized, for sale.

“Take this hypothetical case,” she said, “which would not have been hypothetical for long. An infertile couple, decent, civilized folks, who, after trying unsuccessfully a number of other possible solutions, want to clone a child. They are sad, frustrated, desperate. It is impossible not to sympathize with them.”

“Not impossible,” I said.

“All right,” she said. “Fine. They go to a doctor who specializes in cloning. When they take this step, it is no longer extreme or outside the law. They are acquainted with several couples who have done it, though for our couple—let's give them this—it is a last resort. The doctor listens to their story. He has heard it many times before. He invites them to consider cloning a child from a donor cell that is unrelated to either of them, or to anyone in their immediate family.”

“In their case,” I said, “presumably an improvement.”

“You're joking, but that's exactly the point,” she said. “Anyway. The couple has considered this. The doctor suggests that a child of their own choosing might well be preferable to a child of their own. They are open to this suggestion.”

“Why?”

“Why not?” Anna said. “Since it was now possible, and safe, why
would they
not
choose to have a baby better, more perfect, than any, even with all the luck in the world, they could make on their own? That the doctor would make this same argument to a couple who were not infertile does not occur to our guys. Why should it? They can't think of a reason why they would not choose a better baby. They like the idea of a better baby. The idea of it brings them relief, and makes them feel proud.”

“It would not be theirs,” I said.

“That's one way of looking at it. She would carry it. Deliver it. Nurse it. They would raise it. They would love it.”

“Still.”

“Still,” she said. “So the doctor shows them a catalog of donor cells he has available for purchase. There are donor bios they can read and color mug shots they can look at. The clinic has tissue samples of each available child in its deep freeze. Our couple is given a price list. They choose the best baby available, or the best baby they can afford. Let's say they are wealthy, that money is no object, and let's say that for them beauty is the prime virtue. So they choose to clone, to buy, as their child, Clarissa Harlowe.”