The Bradbury Report (7 page)

We had just eaten dinner, which Anna prepared in my out-of-date, underequipped kitchen. I can't remember what we ate that night; but it would likely have been meatless (chilaquile? ratatouille? kung pao mock duck?), and it would have been good. Anna is an accomplished cook. Everything she fixed for me—that visit, and later—was good. I could not have loved Sara more than I did, but it would be fair to say that as a cook, my wife was erratic, ambitious beyond the reach of her skills, overzealous in her use of spices, indifferent to matters of presentation, and odd in her ideas about what went well with what.

We were sitting in the living room, my wife's old friend and I. I had done the dishes, which was the arrangement we'd tacitly adopted: Anna cooked the evening meal, shopped for the ingredients; I cleaned up after. Since Sara's death, lunch, when I thought to eat it, was usually catch-as-catch-can. Four times a week on average, sometime after one o'clock when the lunch rush subsides, I walked into town and got a sandwich or soup at what I'll call here, for old times' sake, the New Times Café. This didn't change with Anna's arrival. If anything, I was more eager for reasons to leave the house, and did so, not only for lunch, but whenever I could come up with a plausible—and, you have to believe, perfectly unconvincing—excuse. I assured Anna she was welcome to join me on these furloughs, which, in all instances, she declined to do. Because, of course, she, too, was uncomfortable in the awkwardnesses
of our cohabitation—likely more uncomfortable than I, as she was not in her own home—and happy to see me leave.

It was 7:30. I was on the couch, a lumpy, scratchy thing (I mean the couch, though I had more than a few lumps myself), looking halfheartedly at a newsweekly Anna had picked up on one of her shopping excursions. She was sitting in a threadbare old wing chair—already a secondhand piece when Sara and I came upon it early in our marriage—which was where I customarily sat. Her feet were up, shoes off, on a needlepoint-covered footstool Sara bought to dress up the chair. We had not spoken in several minutes, not an easy interval of silence to abide. I was thinking there was just this night to get through, then one more night, then Anna would leave. Then I saw she'd put down the book she was reading—I don't remember what it was, but it was thick—and was staring at me. There was nothing combative in the way she looked at me. I would have said doleful. I sought for something harmless to say.

“When did you stop eating meat?” was what I produced. “When I knew you, you were not vegetarian.”

“It's mostly red meat I won't eat,” she said. “I was not a lot of things when you knew me. I was not a wife. I was not a mother. Not a teacher.” She listed her vocations—they were for her clearly that—with real passion, for which I envied her. She shook her head, as if to clear it of a disconcerting scene. “I don't know what I was. When you knew me. I was hardly anything. And, anyway, why? Was the dinner bad?”

“No. No. It was delicious. You're a wonderful cook.”

“I am satisfactory, just,” she said. “You're easily pleased. My husband was a far better cook than I am.” She spoke of her husband, whenever she did, by name, which I won't give here. “He was wonderful in the kitchen.” She smiled.

“You miss him.” I had become, more and more with age, master of the obvious.

She laughed at me. “I do. Of course I do.”

“Of course,” I said.

“Ray,” she said. She was turning the conversation, taking charge. Again the way she said my name made me feel a little less absent. She
took off her reading glasses, put them on the occasional table beside her, turned off the lamp. We were not quite in the dark; under circumstances less tense I might have taken the chance to doze. “Probably better,” she said, “if I can't see you very well while we talk. I'm afraid I might lose my nerve.”

“You're not afraid of me,” I said. “Goodness.”

“I'm not afraid of you. It's that, for all your pretense at rudeness, you seem such a kind old man.”

“I don't know how kind I am,” I said. “I'm beginning to dodder. But I don't know that I feel very kind. I wouldn't depend too much on that.”

“Oh, no. I do depend on that. And it worries me.”

I considered keeping silent at this point, as a means, maybe, of demonstrating how contingent my kindness could be, but more as a way of forestalling whatever it was coming at me. “Worries you because?” I said.

“Because this will be hard on you. It is hard on me. It will be harder on you. I wish that weren't the case.”

“Why don't we forget it, then?”

“Tell me this,” she said. “What do you know about cloning?” When I didn't answer right away, she said, “This is the best I can do. There is no graceful way to start. I'm not asking what you think, necessarily. I'm asking what you know.”

“I don't know anything.” Which was true. “I don't think anything.” Also true.

“Not an overly impressive stance.” There was affection in her voice.

“I have no stance.” I felt piteously little affection for her then. “I know nothing about cloning. Should I? I guess I'm ashamed to say it, but I don't.”

“Your shame—mock if you want—is not the issue.”

“No mocking,” I said. “What are we talking about?”

“All right,” she said. “Listen to what I tell you.”

“I'll listen,” I said, “if you'll turn on the light. Would you mind? I can't do this in the dark. It's too theatrical. Leave your glasses off if
you don't want to see me. I need to see you. If we're going to do this.”

She turned the lamp back on—I'd been harsh; I could see I'd hurt her feelings—and left her glasses on the table where she'd put them.

“I don't mean to be theatrical. What I mean to do, what I've come to do, is tell you what you'll need to know.”

“In order to?”

“I'll get to that,” she said. “Will you let me speak?”

“Please,” I said.

“I am a small part,” Anna said, “of a group that opposes cloning, a group for whom cloning is a national, as well as personal, disgrace. It is morally and in every other way abhorrent. We believe cloning damns the soul of this country, if this country still has a soul, and the souls of all of us who stand by, do nothing. And we are determined to use all available means, short of armed insurrection, to put an end to this practice.”

I wondered here, but didn't ask, what they planned to do about the conceivably hundreds of millions of clones already in existence. Would these creatures, I didn't know how else to think of them, have the sins of their makers visited on them?

“We are too few, too covert, to be a coherent force. So long as we are small, so long as what we say and do makes no difference, we are tolerated by the government. Perhaps, without knowing it, we are even indulged. The general population ignores us. We are only loosely conjoined, intentionally so. I don't really know any of the others. I know a scant few of them only by sight. I know no one's name.”

The configuration she described—the system of isolate, atomistic, say, three-person action cells designed to prevent discovery and capture of greater numbers—was familiar to me from a film I'd seen when I was a boy. It was an old, old film, in black and white—I can't imagine where my friend got the disk—called
The Battle of Algiers
. I had not heard of it then, have not heard it referred to since. It was the first foreign film I'd seen, the first time I'd had to contend with subtitles. It moved me inordinately. As I remember, it filled me with a direction-less fervor and indignation, and a completely unearned sense of my
own virtue, none of which persisted much beyond the afternoon I spent watching it. Was there some secret handshake or gesture, a single mutating password, or a call-and-response sequence of trigger words, with which one member of Anna's group identified herself to another? I wanted to ask this, too.

“My husband was in the group before I was. He was in it from the first. He'd had a voice in shaping it. This was before we married, before I met him, before the state took over the dirty work and made it policy. When the replication program was instituted, he refused to participate. As I did. As you did not. This is a truth hard for me to make peace with, but he would probably be alive still if there had been a clone. I believe he was right to do what he did. I believed in him, in what he believed. I involved myself in the resistance; I stayed involved through all the frustrating and fruitless years. I'm still involved, probably, because of him.”

Here she stopped. She picked up her glasses and put them on. She rose. “Give me a minute,” she said. She went into the kitchen, from which she called out, “Can I get you something?”

“I'm fine,” I said.

I heard the microwave kick on. She came back with a mug of tea. She sat down and left her glasses on. What she said next was different in substance and tone, more confidential. It was something, I believe, she had not expected to say.

“This is too much for me, I'm afraid. Too costly. I'm no longer up to it, if I ever was. And now, with what has happened, without him, I've been asked to go past where I should ever have been asked to go. Past, really, where I'm willing to go.”

I could see she was ready to cry. I said nothing. I watched while she sought to compose herself. I tried to help her by assuming, seated on the couch, what I meant to be a sympathetic posture. We are, all things considered, a ridiculous species, not worth copying.

“I don't want to be here, Ray. I can't say for sure what my husband would have wanted me to do. I don't want to bring you into this. I am not taking revenge, if that's what you've been thinking. I'm not. I'm not vengeful, towards you or anyone. I don't have it in me. Over
the years, when I thought of you at all, I thought of you kindly. I wished you well. And Sara. I don't want to be in this, myself. I want to be at home, or visiting my children. I want to be with their children. I regret every minute not in their presence, one or the other of them. I want to be at ease. You understand this. I want to be easy. I'm not sick, but I've begun to wear down. As much as I can, I want to enjoy what's left. However this goes, whatever happens, this will be the last of it for me. And it will not go well.”

I am not a man who is undone by a woman crying. In the seven years we were married, I watched Sara cry many times. What you'd expect in the routine course of things. Not once, I want to believe, was it the result of intentional cruelty on my part.

“You are lucky in your children,” I said.

“I'm sorry for you,” she said.

“No. I mean, not just now. Not just because of what you said. I think about this all the time. I try not to, but I do. I wonder what my life might be, had my son lived.”

What she did next made me uncomfortable: she came and sat beside me on the couch. I recognized it as a gesture of consolation, but it felt intrusive. She was too close. I could smell the dinner on her.

“You should refuse, Ray,” she said. “You should listen to me, then you should refuse. Send me home. I'll tell them you can't be trusted. That you are too great a risk. Don't do what I ask. When I ask, refuse me.”

“How could I not?” I said.

Then I asked a question I was surprised I had not asked already. “How did you find me?”

As I thought she might, she smiled. “I wish I could say, ‘We have our ways,' but it was one call to the alumni relations office.”

“I wouldn't have known how to find you.”

“You wouldn't have wanted to,” she said.

I told Anna I wonder often what my life might be like if my son had lived. This is true, and not at all a recent phenomenon. What I didn't say was this: I have not wondered, or only very rarely, what, had he lived—he would be thirty-four—my son, and
his
life, might be like.
What this says about me is not something I'm happy to acknowledge. Worse, there is a broadly correlative question I ask myself with an obsessive frequency. If, like some accursed fairy-tale father, I'd been given the choice to save one or the other of them, my young wife or my infant son, which would I have spared? The question is atrocious. So, too, that I would ask it over and over again, that I would ask it at all. My response, because I have one, because it never changes, because each time it is immediate and unflinching and unequivocal, is obscene. Given the choice to save my wife or my son, I would, now and always, save my wife, whom I loved and knew and lived with and depended on.

“In twenty-five years,” she said, “we've been able to gain no firsthand knowledge of what goes on inside the Clearances. Which is remarkable, given how diligent we've been. If the government is doing what it set out to do, there will be close to two hundred and fifty million clones in there, living their lives. We can only speculate. How do they live? Day to day, hour to hour. What do they do? How are they treated? What do they eat? How do they think, and what do they think about? How are the infants produced? If they are borne, who bears them? Who delivers them? Are they suckled? How are they reared? Who rears them? Who, that is, are their parents? Are they parented? Do they get an education of any sort? Are they taught to speak? Are they permitted to speak? Have they developed a language of their own? How are they governed? Are they named? Are the males and females segregated? Do they feel desire? Do they feel love? What if these living repositories of human parts themselves require medical care? Do they know they are clones? Do they experience what we would call a sense of self, whatever we might mean by that? What happens when a clone gets old? What happens when a clone dies? Of natural causes, I mean, before he or she is harvested. What happens when they've been harvested? Suppose a hand is taken? Or a leg? Or an eye? Or a liver? Their heart. What is done with what remains? Do they protest? Can they conceive of protest? Do they rebel? Are they punished? What form does their punishment take? How are they dressed? Do they know kindness? Do they know God? If so, what
God? Are clones human beings? If they are not, in what way not? What are the differences between them and us? Where, in the business of cloning—it is a business, if the government is involved—is the profit? How is the money made?”