The Bradbury Report (33 page)

“Clarissa Harlowe?”

“Whatever you want to say about her acting, she was generally held to be the most beautiful woman of her generation.”

“She was a heroin addict,” I said.

“Makes no difference. So let's say we really like this couple and want them to be happy. Let's say we think they deserve happiness.”

“She was decapitated.”

“It doesn't matter. She was beautiful. They want a daughter, and, above all else, they want their daughter to be beautiful.”

“They want her to be Clarissa Harlowe?”

“They do” she said, “and they believe that because they will bring her up, she will be
their
Clarissa Harlowe. Now suppose everyone, or even, say, one percent of those who wanted a beautiful daughter—this, too, would have been possible—chose to clone Clarissa Harlowe.”

“You're exaggerating for effect,” I said.

“I'm not,” she said. “But, beyond the ungodly circumstance of
there being, at any one time, thousands of Clarissa Harlowes, young and old, preening around the country, hundreds in the same city, dozens in the same town, and the not inconceivable event of two or more of these beauties bumping into one another—what happens to our notions of beauty? of talent? of individuality? of the self?—the point is that in the way cloners exert control over the cloned, cloning is despotic. To take just this example, cloning gives us an unnatural opportunity to have our way, to work our wills on the identity of our children. The enlightened notion that all children, no matter who they are, should be wanted children would, with the possibility of cloning, inevitably mutate into the belief that only those children who fulfill
our
wants,
our
needs, would be worth having.”

Here's what I was thinking, somewhat off the point, in the passenger seat of the Redux: if Alan were my son, that is, if he were a clone of my dead son grown into a man, and I'd had him made to replace the son I'd lost, I'd miss him, my lost son, all the more.

 

When we'd been in Regina several weeks and had settled in to our town house on St. John Street—after six months at very close quarters, Alan and I were thankful each to have his own bedroom—I got it into my head that, some night after Anna was asleep, very much on the sly, I would take Alan to a brothel.

I felt sorry for the boy. He'd been eager to placate Anna and had done as she'd asked: since his talking to in Winnipeg, he'd watched no pornography and, so far as I knew, and perhaps prematurely, he'd quit masturbating. In his work with Anna, he'd made geometric progress. (When the Tall Man came on his monthly visits, Alan still refused to do anything but sit silent on the couch.) Anna had recently begun reading
Great Expectations
with him. With her help he was able to withstand the language and keep pace with the plot, and seemed to enjoy the book. (Anna told me he found the novel's more realistic portraits—Pip, for instance, Joe and Mrs. Joe, Estella—no less fictive or fantastic than its out-and-out grotesques.) He was still somewhat slow of speech—his speech showed signs of echolalia—and self-conscious about it, but when he relaxed and got going, when he was in
the mood to talk, he was thoughtful and clear and even at times simply eloquent. Except when he was upset, or frightened, he was reasonably poised and self-contained. There was nothing about his behavior readily apparent to distinguish him from most other sensible young men his age, and he could be counted on to behave well with us in private, and—he had not yet been by himself—with us in public. He'd worked hard to make himself passable, I hesitate to say it, normal. There was something sad about his diligence: no one, really, to appreciate the effort and the results but Anna and I, and our responses were not the ones he was interested in. Virtual sequestration, along with a broad-based abstemiousness and chastity of all sorts, had been my chosen state going on forty years. But Alan, who'd spent all but the last seven months of his life as a clone living with other clones in captivity (you supply the joke about the American polity), was young and virile and, suddenly, desperately heterosexual. If there was something, and there was, Miss Havisham-like about my life since Sara's death (to my credit, I'd exacted revenge on no one but myself), Alan had been given no choice but to live, living with us, the life of Rapunzel. In my opinion he needed, now that he knew what one was, and had seen what they could do and have done to them, needed before very much longer, a girl. A girl, such was my thinking, who knew her craft, who would treat him well, and with whom he would be safe.

I'd never been to a brothel. That I knew of, I'd never seen a prostitute and suspect I wouldn't recognize one if she stepped up and licked my ear. On the rare and random instances when it had crossed my mind, the thought of seeking comfort in a brothel elicited only guilt and terror and disgust. But there I was, planning to act as pander, and ready to pay Alan's way. In Regina, the legal brothels, female and male, are confined, one hard upon the other, to a small subdistrict unofficially called “the Purg,” which comprises two blocks of a larger entertainment zone, with betting parlors, electronic cafés, espresso bars, pot joints, retros, amusement arcades, multiscreen digital theaters, a VR Disney World for the kids, and the Globe, Regina's one legitimate theater. I knew where it was, the Purg, up Scarth Street no more than half a mile from our town house. We'd passed through
it several times during the day—soon after our arrival in Regina, we'd taken Alan to a movie, some deafening, frantic science fiction thing he didn't like, and which we didn't see through to the end—when there was nothing, no lights, no customers, no girls, to signal its function.

Alan and I were sitting in the living room, watching an informational program about the drought in the Northwest Territories attributable to a severe shortfall of snow there the past few winters. I was on the loveseat, Alan in a small club chair, his stocking feet up on an ottoman. It was after eleven o'clock, a weeknight in mid-March, still very much winter in Regina. Anna had gone to bed early. We were both bored by the show. Alan was restless.

“I have an idea,” I said. “Might we turn off the TV?”

“I don't care if you turn it off,” he said.

“If you're interested, I won't.”

“Well, I'm not interested,” he said.

“Anyway,” I said, “I have an idea.”

“What is your idea?”

“What if we took a walk? You and I? How does that sound?”

“How does that sound to me?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I don't know how that sounds,” he said. “Would she come with us?” With Alan, “she” always meant Anna.

“She's in her bed,” I said. “We'll let her sleep. She's tired.”

“She is tired,” he said. This reads as if it might have been combative, but it was not. “Are you tired?”

“I'm not,” I said. “Which is why I want to take a walk.”

“With me?”

“Yes.”

“Not with Anna?”

“No. With you. If you want to. Do you want to?”

“I don't know if I want to,” he said. “Is she fast asleep?”

“I think she is,” I said.

“Is it bedtime?”

“Well, yes. It
is
bedtime. So we can go to bed. If you're tired. If you're not tired, we can take a walk. If you want to.”

“I don't know if I want to. You and I?”

“Yes,” I said. “The two of us.”

“The two of us never walked before.”

“That's true. We haven't.”

“It's dark.”

“It is dark.” It was hard for me not to fall into his pattern. Anna had no trouble resisting.

“It's cold.”

“Listen, Alan, we don't have to go.”

“All right,” he said.

“Does that mean you don't want to go?”

“It doesn't mean I don't want to go,” he said. “Where will we go?”

“Well, I have an idea about that.”

“What is your idea?” he said, and we were back where we started, which often happened when I talked with him.

“What would you say if we took a walk to a place where you could be with a girl?”

“I would say I would like to be with a girl,” he said.

“I know you would.”

“You know I would. What kind of girl?”

“A pretty girl.”

“I would like her. What's her name?”

“I don't know her yet,” I said.

“I don't know her either,” he said.

“We'll meet her, and then she'll tell you her name.”

“When will I meet her?”

“When we get where we're going,” I said.

“Where are we going?”

“We're going to a place where there will be a girl for you.”

“A pretty girl,” he said.

“That's right.”

“For me.”

The night was cold—Alan insisted on wearing his Jets cap—but there was little wind, and the air was clear and dry. By the time we
started our walk it was midnight. Not accustomed to being out so late, to being out at any time unaccompanied by Anna, Alan was edgy and stayed close by my side, though not close enough that our bodies might touch. Near the town house the streets were quiet, which helped calm him. We'd walked about a quarter of a mile with not a word spoken between us, the lights of the Scarth Street entertainment zone, within it the Purg, just visible ahead, when I was given a rare moment of clear-headedness, in which I saw, with absolute certainty, the idea of taking Alan to a brothel was, in the real world, a bad one, that acting on it would be utterly inappropriate and irresponsible, and that the consequences of our proceeding as planned would be, for all of us, very sad. Alan might experience some ephemeral sexual satisfaction, but the price paid would be high: disillusionment, several kinds of sadness, embarrassment, disorientation. (He did not know enough for self-loathing.) If he wanted more, he'd be a long time getting it, so there'd be frustration and anger, and a good chance he'd revert, now with greater urgency, to pornography. There's no telling what the effect would be on his feelings about women in general, or on his feelings about Anna, the way he treated her. Anna would be angry and hurt. She'd rightly blame me—she'd be furious—and whatever trust had accrued between us would be breached irreparably. That my motives had included no self-interest (nor an ounce of wisdom or sense) would get me no leniency. She'd want to throw me out, make sure somehow I'd have nothing more to do with Alan. Alan would, in all the important ways, be innocent, of course, but would she be able to forgive him his betrayal—I believed that's how she'd read it—his transgression, when it came down to it, his desire?

We had come to an all-night retro at the edge of the entertainment zone. We could see two men sitting inside at the counter. From where we stood, the booths along the front window appeared empty.

“Let's duck in here for a minute,” I said.

“Is the girl in there?” Alan said.

“No,” I said.

“Has she left for a minute?”

“No, Alan. I'm afraid this is not the place with the girl.”

“I'm afraid I don't want to go in it.”

“Just for a minute. We'll get warm. We'll have a snack.” I tried to make it sound exotic. “A late-night snack.”

“No, thank you. I don't want a snack. Where is the place?”

“It's farther along. I'm not sure where it is.”

“You're not sure.”

“I've never been there.”

“I've never been there either,” he said.

“I know. Let's just go in. I want to talk to you.”

“You want to talk to me about the girl?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“No,” I said.

“Is she farther along?”

“I think she is.”

“I want to go farther along,” he said.

“Give me a minute, Alan. I want to talk. Please come inside with me.”

“All right,” he said. “A minute.”

We sat down across from one another, by the window in one of the booths. Formica tables edged with aluminum, red leatherette seats and backs. The waitress, who'd been behind the counter talking to the two men, came over. She was middle-aged and looked tired. She was wearing a gray pinafore with a white collar. Pinned to her breast pocket was a white plastic nameplate with “Josie” printed on it. You were meant to know that wasn't her real name, but part of the overall mock-up. Her hands were red and chapped.

“Have you got any pie?” I said.

“We're picked pretty clean,” she said. She was more affable than I'd expected. “We've got a couple of pieces of apple, some cherry. There may be a piece of banana cream left.”

“Do you want some pie?” I said to Alan. He looked at his reflection in the window and did not answer.

“Give us two pieces of the apple pie,” I said.

“You want ice cream on that?” she said. “Steamed cheese?”

“You do steamed cheese?” I said.

“Yeah. You want steamed cheese?”

“We do,” I said. “And bring us two Cokes.”

“
Please
,” Alan said.

As the waitress went to put in our order, two couples came into the retro, their entrance presaged by an inrush of cold air. The men looked to be older than Alan, in their late twenties, early thirties; the girls with them were younger, eighteen or nineteen at most. Alan was sitting with his back to the door and couldn't see them at first. The two men were dressed well, both wearing dark wool greatcoats, scarves, and leather gloves. The men were hatless, and their ears were bright red. The girls had on luminescent, neon-colored ski parkas with fur-trimmed hoods, thick wool mittens, and shin-high, fleece-lined boots. They had their hoods drawn tight, and I couldn't see their faces. They made a lot of noise coming in, laughing, carrying on. Whatever they'd been doing, they'd had fun and more than a few drinks. One of the girls was clinging to the man she was paired with, her mouth on his neck. As they moved by us the cold air poured off them. They stopped just past our booth, standing over my shoulder, without once glancing at us, or otherwise acknowledging our presence. One of the girls put her mittened hand on my arm to steady herself. They took off their coats. Alan could see them now. The men were wearing business suits. The girls had on cocktail dresses, provocative flimsy things—their necks, shoulders, arms, legs left exposed—ludicrously wrong for the weather. The girls were pretty. They both immediately fluffed their hair. They sat down in the booth next to ours, at my back.